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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 chips, dubbed “Panther Lake” will hit consumer laptops starting in early 2026.
- Panther Lake is focused on improved performance and power efficiency, with impressive raw numbers.
- Some of the more impactful features aren’t as flashy, but translate to better connectivity and improvements for gamers.
Intel recently hosted its Tech Tour 2025 event in Arizona, showing off the next generation of processor technology to press and analysts, codenamed “Panther Lake”. The new line of chips is slated to power a wide range of upcoming laptop models with improved battery efficiency and performance with the new A18 process technology.
Also: I saw Intel’s new ‘Panther Lake’ chip first-hand, and it could be a turning point
I had the opportunity to attend the event in Arizona, a short distance from the company’s manufacturing plant, and what really impressed me wasn’t just the performance upgrades. Some of the less-discussed technology could be game-changers when they finally land on laptops early next year.
Here are a few technologies I think will be significant for the everyday user.
Better, faster Wi-Fi
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I didn’t expect to walk away excited by Panther Lake’s improvements to wireless connectivity, but that’s exactly what happened. First off, the chip will introduce support for 6GHz band to laptops. According to Intel, a 6GHz band is twice as fast as a 5GHz channel, with a bandwidth spectrum up to 1,200 MHz wide.
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 a access point across multiple channels, hopping between bands in order to ensure the best connection.
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For example, let’s say you’re trying to transmit a big video file across a 5GHz channel, but it’s congested because a lot of 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 Configuration. This allows access points to detect if a Wi-Fi channel is being underutilized, and if so, will move all client devices over to a different channel, shutting down the previous band down to conserve energy.
Big power to gamers
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Panther Lake promises a major leap forward in gaming performance with Intel’s new Xe3 GPU architecture. Compared to the older Xe2 design, Xe3 boasts 25% more threads, upgraded 12-bit vector engines, and an enhanced ray tracing unit to deliver realistic lighting.
“These micro-architectural improvements translate into real-world performance,” Intel Fellow Tom Peterson said during the gaming technology session. It’s a common theme, with the improved A18 process technology resulting in better performance and efficiency.
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Intel performed early benchmarks with Panther Lake, and the results were impressive. A single frame was rendered in just 22.84 milliseconds on the new hardware, compared to 45.44 milliseconds on the previous Lunar Lake architecture, so it’s a significant leap in speed. These performance gains come from precise optimizations, such as a larger L1 cache plus variable register allocation.
Panther Lake advances Intel’s approach to graphical rendering via a new software technology called XeSS Multi-Frame Generation (or MFG for short). The chip creates a base image via rasterization techniques and then utilizes AI to generate up to three extra frames per native frame, resulting in ultra-smooth gameplay that feels like the frame rate is much higher.
During the event, we saw 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 to be much higher — at over 130FPS. It maintained consistently smooth gameplay without any tearing or other graphical artifacts.
Whether or not this means Intel will surpass AMD in the gaming remains to be seen and depends on plenty of other factors. The first laptops with Panther Lake chips will arrive in the first months of 2026, at which time we’ll be going hands on to see what they can do.
