Intel shows off its new Panther Lake laptop processorswhich will begin appearing on devices in early 2026. They're damn exciting for many reasons, but gamers will especially be eyeing the Xe3 integrated graphics, which come in 4-core and supercharged 12-core variants. Intel employee Tom Peterson spoke with Adam about this at Latest PCWorld video on YouTube.
Obviously, it's worth looking at the 12-core version of the Panther Lake iGPU, which has a 50 percent increase in core count over Lunar Lake and brings a huge graphics boost to thin and light laptops (and maybe even gaming laptops, which are currently dominated by AMD's Ryzen Z series). In addition to the usual power increases that new chips receive, the Xe3 series gains new Intelligent Bias Control capabilities for more precise management of game resources, x3 and x4 frame generation for all games that support XeSS 2, as well as several other optimizations.
Tom is a great guest…who you might recognize from The Full Nerd podcast— but unfortunately, he wasn't able to elaborate on this new Intel-Nvidia partnership. And there's no news on when or even if all these NPUs in AI computers will add anything to the gaming experience. Intel also doesn't make dedicated chips for portable devices like AMD, although at least one family from a major manufacturer (MSI Claw) is offered by Intel.
For more information about Panther Lake, be sure to visit Mark Hachman's deep dive into new chips. And subscribe to PCWorld YouTube channel if you want to see more videos like this.
