It’s been promised for years: a mobile processor with an integrated GPU capable of powering through AAA games. A recent Geekbench leak of Intel’s upcoming Panther Lake processors shows that day might soon arrive.
Excitement was already high for Intel’s next-gen mobile chips, which are the first to be built using Intel’s 18A 2-nanometer fab process. Every chip release is important, but Panther Lake is a crucial one for Intel as it attempts to fend off advances from rivals Apple, AMD and Qualcomm.
The chipmaker will officially launch its Core Ultra Series 3 processors developed under the Panther Lake codename at CES in January, and the show will be littered with laptops based on the new processors. But we don’t need to wait until then to see the first benchmarks from a Panther Lake laptop.
Panther Lake Geekbench leak
Listen, it’s easy to accidentally publish a Geekbench score. If you run the test without first entering your license, the result gets uploaded to the Geekbench database, which is public and easily searchable. So, this isn’t the first time a laptop’s Geekbench scores were released before the laptop itself.
An eagle-eyed editor at Wccftech spied a Geekbench 6 GPU test result for a Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Pro laptop with an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H CPU, 32GB of RAM and integrated Intel Arc B390 graphics. The Core Ultra X7 358H features 16 cores, and the iGPU is based on Intel’s Xe3 architecture.
The Galaxy Book Pro is a thin-and-light ultraportable that’s about as far away from a gaming laptop as you can get, and yet the yet-to-be-released Galaxy Book 6 Pro showed some graphics prowess based on its OpenCL score. Its score of 57,001 nearly matched the 58,044 score of a laptop with an RTX 3050 Ti GPU and easily outpaced the 50,915 score of an RTX 3050 laptop.
Meanwhile, a laptop with Intel’s current integrated Arc 140V graphics based on its Xe2 architecture managed a score of 27,666. Based on these numbers, we are looking at more than a 2x improvement from Lunar Lake’s second-gen Arc graphics to Panther Lake’s third-gen graphics.
A couple caveats:
- Geekbench is a synthetic benchmark and not a true test of real-world 3D performance. Until we can throw some games at Panther Lake’s iGPU, we won’t be able to form a full opinion of its capabilities.
- The OpenCL GPU test is not as good of an indicator of 3D performance as the Vulkan GPU test, which is why we run the Vulkan test for our laptop reviews.
Panther Lake handhelds, too?
In addition to getting thinner and lighter gaming laptops next year with Intel’s Panther Lake CPUs, it looks like we will also see a gaming handheld with the new chips. According to reports, Intel will release a Panther Lake processor specifically for handhelds that could show up next year in a follow-up to the Lunar Lake-based MSI Claw that we first saw last year at CES.
