Intel is raising its game, and the Panther Lake range looks set to take on AMD in style.
In the opinion of many specialists, Intel was playing big, very big even, with the launch of its new generation of processors, Panther Lake. Primarily designed for notebooks in particular, and the nomadic world more generally, this generation was intended to harvest the seeds sown by previous generations - Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake - which hadn't been entirely convincing, but which nonetheless brought good things to the table.
Intel ARC B390 (Panther Lake) performance © Computer Base
Panther Lake was therefore intended to capitalize on these good points and go one step further, in order to trouble not only its direct competitor, AMD, but also more indirect adversaries such as Apple and Qualcomm. It's obviously far too early to say that the contract has been fulfilled for Intel, but the feedback from the first salvo of Panther Lake notebooks is excellent, with the Intel ARC B390 integrated graphics solution (iGPU) in particular proving to be quite remarkably powerful. What's more, this has been achieved at a very reasonable power consumption level.
Intel ARC B390 (Panther Lake) performance © NotebookCheck
This is essentially what the first measurements carried out by the ComputerBase (top) and NotebookCheck (bottom) websites tend to demonstrate. Equipped with a 16-core CPU (4 P-Cores Cougar Cove, 8 E-Cores Darkmont, 4 LPE-cores Darkmont), a 50 TOPS NPU and a 12-core Xe3 GPU, the Core Ultra X9 388H is a real monster: it boasts 163% higher performance than the Ryzen AI 9 X 370 at comparable power levels (25 W vs. 24 W), and is even more impressive - albeit by a smaller margin - when the AMD chip is boosted to 65 W! To make matters worse, this high power output doesn't seem to affect the autonomy of a beast that some have flashed at over 30 hours on a single charge!
