Panther Lake has finally arrived on my test bench. Well, the chip "formerly codenamed" Panther Lake, anyway. Intel would much prefer we refer to its new chip generation as the Intel Core Ultra Series 3—which is the name you'll find emblazoned on the specs sheet of many thin and light laptops in the next few months. And maybe the odd handheld eventually, too.
The headline news here is the gaming performance, as Intel has supercharged the onboard iGPU of several of its new chips to provide a sizable whack of graphics grunt. I've been testing an Asus Zenbook Duo equipped with the very tippety-top of the lineup, the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H, complete with a 12 Xe3 core-equipped Intel Arc B390 iGPU. One thing has become immediately obvious—it's a surprisingly grunty graphics cruncher when pushed to its limits.
