Intel's Panther Lake Chip is its biggest win in years

https://www.wired.com/story/intel-panther-lake-core-ultra-series-3-review/

32•teleforce•1w ago

Comments

tiffanyh•1w ago

The headline is odd to me given that the article spent so much time comparing it to M5 and still loses considerably to the M5 in single core (199 vs 130).

And it only wins in multi-core simply because it has 16-cores while the M5 base only has 10-cores.

When Apple launches the M5 Pro and/or Ultra this won't be the case.

orev•1w ago

The vast majority of the PC computing world still uses Windows, which doesn’t run on Macs, and Windows on ARM is still in its infancy. An Intel-based chip that’s on par with Apple Silicon is much desired by the marketplace.

tucnak•1w ago

AMD is already serving that segment, and quite successfully, too. I would assume Panther Lake is an improvement for Intel, most notably in the I/O department, but is it really "on par" even with the recent Ryzen variants, let alone Apple Silicon?

bryanlarsen•1w ago

You don't get 22 hours of battery life out of a Ryzen laptop.

hulitu•1w ago

You don't get 22 hours of battery life out of any laptop. Maybe when it sits idle, but we usually turn our laptops on to do something.

bryanlarsen•1w ago

People are getting 15 hours of life doing real work on Linux on Lunar Lake laptops, and Panther Lake is supposed to be better.

Obviously if you're gaming you get less, but the 22 hours that Intel claims and the 22 hours that Apple claims should be roughly comparable.

alecco•1w ago

The reviewed laptop is 14" 32GB 1TB $1,299.

14-inch MacBook Pro M5 with 24GB $1,999.

Intel is -35% price, +60% cores, and most importantly given the 4x prices +33% RAM.

And you can run Windows games and Linux on it.

BugsJustFindMe•1w ago

The reviewed MSI looks like a great 2-in-1, but a laptop is also more than its CPU and RAM. The MBP's screen has substantially higher resolution and brightness and refresh rate, for instance. I'm not saying the MSI isn't a good deal, just that it's not reasonable to compare the prices of two laptops like that.

bryanlarsen•1w ago

Yes you can, because if the user wanted a better screen, he would likely have purchased a laptop with a better screen. You can buy any sort of screen you want in an x86 laptop, from really crappy to better-than-Mac.

prewett•1w ago

You're not comparing the price of the Intel chip that way, though, which is what GP did.

2OEH8eoCRo0•1w ago

How is Linux support on the M5? There is more to a CPU or system than a single benchmark number.

brian_herman•1w ago

Ashai linux people are still working on support. They just posted support for M3.

2OEH8eoCRo0•1w ago

So it's useless to me.

DerArzt•1w ago

You could contribute to the Ashai project if them not yet spending their OSS time budget on the latest m-series chip when they have a backlog is such a problem for you.

izacus•1w ago

Or he could buy a laptop with a slightly slower chip which runs well with Linux and not pay money and his time for privilege of supporting a company building incompatible products.

andrewmcwatters•1w ago

I think Apple’s chip prowess is completely hampered by the fact that I’m buying hardware that is measurably less mine than the lesser x86 chips on the market that I can actually do whatever I want with.

I don’t really care how many hours their laptops last compared to Windows and Linux machines anymore.

I can’t put a price on user freedom. Even if I could, it’s far from negligible.

Apple has chipped away for years at user freedom. It’s an entire tooling and infrastructural development built from intentional strategy. Not a marginal price difference.

Billions of dollars were invested in removing our ability to do common tasks.

thefz•1w ago

I can buy this and install whatever OS I like, though. And I am pretty sure I will 100% own the hardware.

dartharva•1w ago

Note that parts of this line are still manufactured by TSMC. Intel is still not there in terms of fab self-sufficiency.

jauntywundrkind•1w ago

Unfortunately Intel also isn't interested in making Panther Lake:

> "We can’t completely vacate the client market," said Zinsner, but Intel is "shifting as much as we can over to data center to meet the high demand."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/core-ultra-series-3-...

So many smart best things going on on PL. Xe3 GPU looks amazing, especially the 12 core one. I love the extra low power core on the soc chiplet, allowing the main CPU chiplet to post down. Intel's EIMB is great, such an advanced interconnect for low power multi-chip. 18a and backside power. Excellent stuff!

Hard to blame them though for abandoning consumer market, like is happening with the entire rest of the computing market. Why make cores if the rest of the computer is too ghastly expensive to afford?

gradientsrneat•1w ago

Given the timing, it's unlikely this generation of Intel integrated graphics makes use of Nvidia RTX chips. So, the gain on integrated graphics this generation seems impressive, given that graphics isn't Intel's strong suit.

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