Intel is showing off its new Panther Lake laptop CPUs, set to start appearing in devices in early 2026. They’re pretty darn exciting for a lot of reasons, but gamers in particular will be eyeing up those Xe3 integrated graphics that come in 4-core and supercharged 12-core variants. Intel fellow Tom Peterson had a chat with Adam all about it in PCWorld’s latest YouTube video.
The 12-core version of the Panther Lake iGPU is obviously the one to watch, jumping core count over Lunar Lake by 50 percent and giving a huge graphics boost to thin-and-light laptops (and possibly even PC gaming handhelds, currently dominated by AMD’s Ryzen Z series). In addition to the usual power boost that newer chips get, the Xe3 series is getting new intelligent bias control powers for more game-specific resource management, x3 and x4 frame generation for all games that support XeSS 2, and a handful of other optimizations.
Tom’s a great guest—whom you might recognize from The Full Nerd podcast—but unfortunately he couldn’t get specific on that new Intel-Nvidia partnership. And there’s no news on when, or even if, all those NPUs popping up in “AI” PCs will actually add something to gaming powers. Intel’s also not making dedicated chips for handhelds like AMD is, though at least one family from a major manufacturer (the MSI Claw) is offered in Intel flavor.
For more info on Panther Lake, be sure to check out Mark Hachman’s deep dive on the new chips. And subscribe to PCWorld’s YouTube channel if you want to see more videos like this one.
