Intel Core Ultra Series 3 promises 76% faster gaming performance than Lunar Lake
Intel Panther Lake is here
Intel has announced its next-generation Intel Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs at CES 2026 and they’ll be bound in new laptop designs that will be available starting tomorrow, January 6.
Codenamed Panther Lake, this is the sequel to the already very impressive Lunar Lake chips that have powered PCs last year. Intel Core Ultra Series 3 presents a fundamentally different processor architecture by full moving the GPU cores onto its own tile separate from the CPU tile.
Panther Lake’s graphics haven’t just been unchained from the CPU, they’ve been souped up wth 50% more GPU cores and twice the cache. This gives Intel’s new Arc B390 integrated GPU 120 TOPs of GPU performance. According to Intel, Arc B390 graphics offers over 70% faster gaming performance on average compared to its previous generation Lunar Lake chips.
Intel demonstrated Panther Lake’s new gaming performance running Battlefield 6 on Overkill settings at 145 FPS with just integrated Intel Arc B390 graphics. Of course, it can only do this by introducing 3x Multi-Frame Generation we’ve seen on all of Nvidia’s latest Maxwell graphics cards.
Intel is also spinning up a new Panter Lake gaming platform specifically to help develop gaming handhelds with more details coming later this year.
A silicon revolution
Beyond the new graphics architecture in Intel Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs, Panther Lake introduces a new 18A process with new RibbonFET gates for more efficient and faster power delivery. E-cores are also reintroduced with Intel Core Ultra Series 3.
With these to power efficiencies combined, Intel is promising long battery life with up to 27-hours of video streaming.
Lastly, Intel is promising even more AI power with a total of 180 TOPs, toppling over the whopping 120 TOPs from Lunar Lake.
Up next: HP just unveiled its new gaming laptops at CES 2026, and it’s not just the specs that have changed
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.