Intel's "Panther Lake" is set to debut in early 2026, with Intel and its partners unveiling the first laptop designs. The overall performance of the Panther Lake family appears to offer a modest improvement over the previous-generation Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake-H" mobile chips. Recent PassMark scores indicate that the Core Ultra X7 358H SKU—which features 4 P-Cores, 8 E-Cores, 4 LPE-Cores, and 12 Xe3 Cores—shows a slight enhancement over the comparable "Arrow Lake" SKU, the Core Ultra 7 255H, which includes 6 P-Cores, 8 E-Cores, and 2 LPE-Cores. In PassMark testing, the Panther Lake design exhibited a -1.4% performance in single-core score and nearly a 4% increase in multicore score. The regression in the single-core score is likely due to the use of an engineering sample in this benchmark.

"Panther Lake" also replaces "Lunar Lake," and here, performance improvements are much more substantial, while reportedly delivering similar or improved power efficiency, a particularly strong point of "Lunar Lake." Here, the Core Ultra X7 358H delivers a similar single-core performance, and more than 37% multicore score increase. Until the official launch, it is assumed that Intel hasn't shipped mass-production chips to vendors and OEMs. Additionally, the Core Ultra X7 358H SKU has a reported single-core boost of up to 4.8 GHz, compared to 5.1 GHz for the Core Ultra 7 255H and Core Ultra 9 288V SKUs. While there are IPC improvements in Panther Lake, the clock speed differences seem to be the primary factor in the performance variation. Furthermore, the software may not yet be optimized for the newest platform. To draw definitive conclusions, we will need to wait for the official launch and third-party performance benchmarks. Additionally, there is a comparison with the first-generation Core Ultra series "Meteor Lake," which you can check out below.

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