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ZDNET Highlights
- Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 chips, dubbed “Panther Lake”, will be available on consumer laptops in early 2026.
- Panther Lake focuses on superior performance and power efficiency with impressive raw numbers.
- Some of the more impressive features aren’t as flashy, but translate into better connectivity and improvements for gamers.
Intel recently hosted its Tech Tour 2025 event in Arizona, showing off its next-generation processor technology, codenamed “Panther Lake,” to press and analysts. The new series of chips is set to power a wide range of upcoming laptop models with improved battery efficiency and performance with the new A18 process technology.
Also: I got the first look at Intel’s new ‘Panther Lake’ chip, and it could be a turning point
I had the opportunity to attend the event held a short distance from the company’s manufacturing plant in Arizona, and what really impressed me wasn’t just the performance upgrades. Some of the lesser-discussed technologies could be game-changers when they finally arrive on laptops early next year.
Here are some technologies that I think will be important to the everyday user.
Better, faster Wi-Fi
I didn’t expect to walk away excited by Panther Lake’s improved wireless connectivity, but that’s exactly what happened. First, the chip will introduce support for the 6GHz band for laptops. according to intelA 6GHz band is twice as fast as a 5GHz channel, with a bandwidth spectrum of up to 1,200 MHz.
Laptops running the new hardware will support a new flagship Wi-Fi 7 feature called Multi-Link Operation (MLO), which allows devices to connect to an access point across multiple channels, hopping between bands to ensure the best connection.
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For example, let’s say you’re trying to transmit a large video file over a 5GHz channel, but it’s congested because many other devices are on the same band. MLO will automatically move you to the 6GHz channel, which, in this scenario, is congestion-free, improving connection speeds.
Panther Lake will also add support for Wi-Fi 7 Release 2 (R2), which supports multi-link configurations. This allows the access point to detect if the Wi-Fi channel is being under-utilized, and if so, all client devices will be moved to a different channel, shutting down the previous band to save energy.
Big power for gamers
Panther Lake promises a huge leap in gaming performance with Intel’s new Xe3 GPU architecture. Compared to the older Xe2 design, Xe3 features 25% more threads, an advanced 12-bit vector engine, and an advanced ray tracing unit to provide realistic lighting.
“These micro-architectural improvements translate into real-world performance,” Intel Fellow Tom Peterson said during a gaming technology session. This is a common theme, with improved A18 process technology resulting in improved performance and efficiency.
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Intel performed early benchmarks with Panther Lake and the results were impressive. A single frame on the new hardware was rendered in just 22.84 milliseconds, compared to 45.44 milliseconds on the previous Lunar Lake architecture, so this is a significant jump in speed. These performance gains come from precise optimizations, such as a larger L1 cache plus variable register allocation.
Panther Lake XeSS advances Intel’s approach to graphical rendering through a new software technology called Multi-Frame Generation (or MFG for short). The chip creates a base image through rasterization techniques and then uses AI to generate three additional frames per original frame, resulting in ultra-smooth gameplay that feels as if the frame rate is much higher.
During the event, we clocked Panther Lake running the game “Dying Light: The Beast” natively at around 30 fps, but thanks to all the extra frames from XESS MFG, the fps presented itself much higher – over 130 fps. This maintained consistently smooth gameplay without any lag or other graphical artifacts.
This means whether Intel will overtake AMD in gaming remains to be seen and depends on many other factors. The first laptops with Panther Lake chips will arrive in the first months of 2026, at which time we will see what they can do.
