Intel breaks down Core Ultra 3 Panther Lake and who it’s for

In an interview with Intel’s VP of Client Computing, David Feng, we went over the company’s new Intel Core Ultra 3 chips, what’s special about them, and how they’re different from their predecessor. Feng leads Intel’s PC segment, overseeing strategy, customer and partner engagement and more.

Because I’m someone who reviews smartphones, we tackled it from more of a layman’s point of view, essentially Intel Core Ultra 3 for Dummies.

We go over the new Intel Core Ultra 3 (Panther Lake), the changes coming to Arrow Lake (one of last year’s models), and the upcoming Wildcat Lake as well.

How would you position Panther Lake against Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, for dummies like me?  

Feng: We have two similar but different architectures in Series 3 Core Ultra. Lunar Lake has higher power efficiency with only one configuration with CPU and GPU, and two memory configurations at 16GB and 32GB. So by design, it’s a little bit limited even though it’s really, really good for what it does. On the Arrow Lake side, we have a bigger portfolio, a wider range of CPU/GPU options, and performance options that scale up and down. But it’s not as power-efficient as Lunar Lake, and the AI NPU is a little bit weaker. 

So with the Series 3 Ultra, effectively, we just merged these two together into one stack. So, common features, the whole stack has higher power efficiency, longer battery life, and we have two CPU configurations, eight-core and 16-core. We have two graphics configurations, 4XE and 12XE, and we can do a few different configurations. That gives us, and the customer, more choices within the platform. 

Take your favourite OEMs, they may design a system for Panther Lake that may choose all three flavours, 8-core for everyday compute, 16-core for higher core count CPU, and 12XE 16-core for the best capabilities. Everything is compatible. So that kind of flexibility of offering wasn’t possible before. 

While Lunar Lake is done, will there still be new Arrow Lake devices?

Feng: Depending on the segment we’re talking about. If we’re talking about a desktop, yes. We’re doing an Arrow Lake desktop refresh. That’s what we call 200S+ and 200HX+. 

Are you worried about consumers seeing an arrow lake and just thinking that it’s gonna be old or weaker? 

Feng: We did some branding updates, so in 2025, the Arrow Lake HX and S are both 200 Series. We debated long and hard whether or not to call the Arrow Lake HX and S desktop refresh a 300 series. We didn’t feel that was the right thing to do just because they’re refresh products. So we are calling them 200HX and 200S Plus. So that plus sign will be very prominent for our branding and OEM poll out perspective. 

Consumers can look at wherever they’re doing research, Google, Amazon, wherever else and compare what was offered in ’25 without a plus, and in ’26 the Plus SKUs start to show up. 

If I’m a hardcore gamer and I want something mobile, is Panther Lake the best option, or would I want an Arrow Lake HX model or something else? 

Feng: There are more than three billion people who play games in the world. The reason I’m sharing that is just that it’s a wide spectrum of gamers. Somebody who can be extreme hardcore on the one end, say, I’m doing competitive gaming for a living, and on the other side is someone who plays Candy Crush. And then you have all the different, you know, levels of gameplay persona in between. So I would say for the extreme hardcore gamers, they’re going to chase that extreme level frame rate per second, no matter what device they’re using. So, likely they’re going to stick to HX or use the 200 HX+ platform with the top-of-the-line offerings. 

What we also noticed, which is kind of an emerging phenomenon in the past. But as you zoom out a little bit, there’s a good amount of people who are really passionate about gaming because it’s hard to define hardcore, right? So let’s say they’re passionate and spend a fair amount of energy and time on gaming. They’re starting to buy multiple devices to play their games. So they’re going to have hardcore like the top of the line rig, and oftentimes it’s still a desktop at home, and then they may still have top of the line like 18-inch, highest compute mobile as well. But then they’re travelling, and I have so many people telling me that they come to CES or other events, and it’s not very convenient to bring your 18-inch, six-pound machine along with a pretty limited battery life. So as the capability of things like gaming improves, I’m hearing more and more people having a second device, being more thin gaming, even though, when they have the choice to run on a hardcore gaming rig, they’re going to do that for sure to chase that frame per second. But they can’t haul that gaming rig around the globe, so they would have a device to travel with. Or even go to coffee shops and other places with. 

Now with 12XE, we can run anywhere between 25 and 65 watts, and a lot of thin and light designs can handle that 12XE, depending on the power level they’re sitting at, and they can run most, if not all, of the triple-A games. But with medium settings for the most part. Some games you can play at the highest settings, but other games you’ll run at medium settings so you can have a better frame per second. 

Then you can push up a notch and still use Panther Lake with a discrete GPU, and you can pair it with whatever the highest level GPU is. But then your system’s thermal and weight will become a little higher. However, the benefit is still there. And what I mean by benefit is, when people don’t play games or don’t use applications that fire up that discrete GPU, then the power efficiency is going to benefit the users, so they will have tremendous battery life. So let’s just say, I’m a gamer, whatever, hardcore or not, but I’m bringing my machine along with me, when I’m taking notes, it runs fairly low power, but if I’m firing up some heavy games, the battery life will go down, so that’s when I want to plug in. So that’s a long way to say, ‘yeah, absolutely.’

Who’s the perfect customer for the top-of-the-line Panther Lake?

Feng: There’s no one-size-fits-all. The way I’m using my device is probably different than you, different from other people, right? So I would say it’s very much based on the persona. 

I would say, for example, 16-core, 12XE is best for at least a couple of personas, such as content creators. They tend to travel and like to have that rendering capability at their fingertips. They take advantage of features faster, better than probably the rest of the personas out there. And then the mobile gamers we were just talking about. I think of more, but let’s start with a couple.

Then the 8-core CPU, which is the lion’s share of our volume on Panther Lake. That’s great for every day computer, for instance – I go to work, I come home, I use this laptop quite some time every day, right? But I don’t do anything heavy, I attend meetings, I write emails, I look at PowerPoints, I do some Excel, I do a fair amount of online browsing, and I do a bunch of normal productivity work. That 8-core is perfect for me.

Do I need higher performance? I probably don’t need it, but if somebody gives it to me, I’ll be happy to use it. So a 16-core is a little of a waste, but an 8-core is perfect for me. 

And then another persona is going to be someone who’s paired the 16-core with a discrete GPU. That’s going to be heavier, entering into a mobile workstation, and it’s for more serious gaming, more serious content creation, more serious AI and things like that.

But I thought Wildcat was supposed to be one-size-fits-all? 

Feng: We think there’s a need to have a mainstream solution that’s more modern. What I mean by that is, the mainstream segment is really big across consumer and commercial. It’s probably the largest volume price band across the whole PC total available market. What has happened in the past few years, largely driven by the leading technology nodes becoming more and more expensive, has made it hard to bring the latest technology to the mainstream segment. And that’s the difference since a few years ago compared to the past 34 years of PC history.

Where I’m going with that is what we’re excited about with Wildcat Lake is that it’s bringing the latest technology, IP and experience to the mainstream price point. You can say that’s everyday computing as well, but that’s where my workday computing is probably a little bit higher than that everyday computing. We have 7 billion people in the world, and everybody’s everyday computing is slightly different. Everybody’s user model is slightly different, and affordability is slightly different. And with 8-core Panther Lake and 6-core Wildcat Lake, we can have a more expandable price range for different everyday users.

This interview has been edited for clarification and style.