Intel had been teasing Panther Lake for a while, but we didn’t officially know it would be part of CES 2026 until Intel confirmed it during its CES 2026 announcements and showcased it on the show floor. Not only has it been positioned as something that could change the face of Windows laptops, but it’s also exciting for someone like me who usually has to carry around two laptops whenever I leave home to cover events like CES, PAX, or Summer Game Fest. One laptop is for getting work done, and the other is usually a bulky gaming laptop that I crack open when I want to play. As you can imagine, that’s not an idea situation.
Panther Lake, built on Intel’s 18A process technology (which is some powerful stuff), is meant to deliver the best of both worlds: strong everyday performance, enough horsepower for heavier tasks like video encoding, and the ability to do light-to-medium. And the best part is that the top-end Panther Lake chips, like the Core Ultra X9 and Core Ultra X7, are rocking integrated Intel Arc graphics (Arc B390), so you’re getting legit gaming potential without relying on a discrete GPU. And that really had me excited, and I wanted to try it for myself.
While at the event, I was able to get hands-on with several Panther Lake-powered laptops, and they were impressive. I don’t have raw numbers for frame rates or power consumption yet, but that’s fine, because I still got a really good feel for where the SoC is right now. Multiple vendors had games installed on their demo units, so I was able to jump in, change settings, and actually game on them.
I played games like Cyberpunk 2077, Sonic Racing, Painkiller, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Marvel Rivals, and a few others, and I walked away happy with what I experienced. To put it into perspective, when I try to game on my current Lunar Lake laptop, I have to use low-to-medium settings while keeping the resolution around 1080p, and even then, I don’t see anywhere near what I was seeing on the Panther Lake systems.
And that’s clearly what Intel is pushing. When I headed over to Intel’s booth, it was obvious they were trying to show gamers that you can have one laptop that handles both work and play. In one corner, they had a setup with four large wall-mounted screens connected to several Panther Lake machines, where attendees could sit down and play to see how the hardware stacked up. There was also a helpful rep over there who kept trying to get me to jump into demos while explaining why the new chipset is such a big deal.
I’ll admit, I wanted to do more than just game. I wanted actual video encoding numbers, Cinebench scores, and other benchmarks, but that was out of the question on the show floor. Still, I’m impressed with what I saw and played, and I’m already looking to offload my current laptop so I can get my hands on a Panther Lake device and do some testing of my own.
But outside of gaming and workloads, my other big concern is battery life. On my current ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (Intel Core 9 285H), I’m lucky if I get five hours of media consumption, even after tweaking settings with G-Helper. And if I try to game on it, I absolutely need to plug it in. Meanwhile, my Lenovo Yoga (Intel Core 7 258V) gives me great battery life, but gaming or video encoding is basically out of the question. Which is why I tend to carry both with me.
I even tried going with a MacBook for a while because it seemed like the best of both worlds, but I’m just not a macOS fan. I use Windows for a lot of what I do. And yes, I know I can use virtualization and run Windows on a MacBook, but ultimately it didn’t work out for me. So, seeing battery life estimates in the 20-to-30-hour range while still delivering serious performance is, again, extremely exciting.
I came in expecting something magical, and so far, it looks like Intel hasn’t disappointed. It’s going to be really interesting to see what Panther Lake can do going up against AMD’s Strix, Qualcomm, and Apple silicon. This could very well be the shot in the arm Windows laptops have needed, and I can’t wait to see the sparks fly.
