Intel’s huge launch for CES 2026 is its Core Extremely Collection 3 of cell chips, based mostly on the Panther Lake structure it introduced in October. The brand new structure’s largest improve over the Core Extremely 200’s resides within the new Xe3 graphics cores that promise considerably higher efficiency at decrease energy draw than the Xe2 era in Lunar Lake, utilized by among the Core Extremely 200 variants. And the corporate briefly talked about there will be a future handheld console platform based mostly on Panther Lake. There are zero particulars now, however count on some later this 12 months.
A lot of the non-graphics facets of Panther Lake embrace a variety of optimizations over earlier generations, plus a transfer to Intel’s smaller (2nm) 18A course of node, which ought to end result within the related chips being higher total, drawing notably much less energy. The primary techniques incorporating the three Collection processors start transport instantly.
New naming nomenclature comes with the territory. For one, it is now often known as Collection 3 — or perhaps I simply by no means referred to as the last-gen Collection 2 — and there is a new “X” within the chip names to indicate the incorporation of the Arc Professional B390 graphics, which has the utmost variety of Xe3 cores (previously code-named 12Xe). It has Extremely 9 and Extremely 7 variations, and the latter options the GPU for which benchmark efficiency was leaked in November.
There is a Core Extremely 5 chip with Arc B370 graphics, which is not denoted by an X. I am nonetheless plowing by the chip lineup to make sense of it, as a result of all of the yay!-gaming efficiency they quote is for that Arc Professional GPU; there is not any indication of how all the opposite chips will fare. The identical goes for Intel’s quote of 27 hours of battery life for streaming video; that is for an Arc Professional-equipped system as effectively.
Intel claims considerably increased gaming body charges, so long as you are profiting from XeSS 3 upscaling and gaming at 1080p. 1080p is okay, but it surely would not account for connecting to a higher-resolution exterior monitor, amongst different issues. XeSS 3 will embrace multi-frame-gen at launch, which makes use of AI to extrapolate a number of subsequent frames from a single.
Intel took a extra modular method to the GPU tiling association, which provides them extra flexibility for scaling efficiency up and all the way down to hit measurement, value and energy necessities for particular person laptop computer producers.
Intel says preorders for the preliminary techniques begin Tuesday.
