Intel’s Panther Lake: A Processor That Could Finally Beat Apple’s M5

Intel’s Panther Lake chip isn’t just a product—it’s a high-stakes gamble to reclaim relevance in a market dominated by Apple and Qualcomm.

Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 outperforms Apple’s M5 in multi-core performance (1285 vs. 922 Cinebench 24) but trails in single-core performance (130 vs. 199).

The Core Ultra X9 388H achieves 55fps in Cyberpunk 2077 with XeSS upscaling, narrowing the gap with discrete GPUs.

Intel’s 18A manufacturing process, built in Arizona with $8.9B U.S. government investment, powers the Series 3. NPU performance at 50 TOPS lags behind Qualcomm’s 80 TOPS but remains competitive for AI inferencing.

Battery life in the Lenovo reference unit exceeds 20 hours, matching Apple’s efficiency claims.