Intel Panther Lake Core Ultra review: Intel’s best laptop CPU in a very long time

Panther Lake’s single- and multi-core CPU performance blows past all of its direct competitors, including AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, the last few generations of Intel mobile processors, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (though the recently announced X2 Elite could change things).

Single-core performance is around 10 percent faster than Core Ultra 200V, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and the Snapdragon chip. The only chips that make Intel’s look bad here are Apple’s—both the M4 and M5 boast considerably higher single-core performance.

The Core Ultra X9 388H’s multi-core performance is also very good, though this is where your laptop’s cooling system and power levels will make the biggest difference. In Asus’ Performance Mode, Panther Lake is around twice as fast as the Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 7 258V and 80–90 percent faster than older 12th- and 13th-generation Core processors and the Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 7 155H, depending on the test. Compared to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, Panther Lake is between 10 and 40 percent faster, again heavily dependent on the test.

But our Handbrake video encoding test also shows the processor consuming a little over 50 W of power, which is usually 20 or 25 W more than all those other chips.

In the lower-power “whisper” mode, the processor consumes closer to 25 W on average during the Handbrake test, putting it on even footing with the other chips. It still transcoded the video more quickly than any of the other processors, except for the Ryzen AI Max+ chip, which has desktop-level power limits.

Panther Lake’s performance at this ~30 W TDP level is still impressive—you get around 95 percent of the single-core CPU performance and 75–85 percent of the multi-core CPU performance, and the processor uses about half as much power under heavy load. And while the Ryzen AI HX 370 gets much closer to Intel’s performance in this mode, Panther Lake still manages to surpass it most of the time.