Long gone are the days of closing a Windows laptop’s lid and losing half of its battery by the time you open it later in the day, according to Intel, as the first wave of Core Ultra Series 3 devices arrive in Australia.
It’s been a multi-year journey for Team Blue, which has ambitiously set out to improve its silicon amidst greater competition from the likes of Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm. Since Intel debuted its first NPU-equipped Core Ultra system-on-a-chip (SoC), codenamed Meteor Lake, followed by Lunar Lake, it has focused on power and efficiency. In other words, better performance while prolonging battery life.
With the Core Ultra Series 3 launch, known by its ‘Panther Lake’ alias, Intel made some fairly bold claims. At a recent Australian media event, Intel claimed that its latest chipset drives up to 60 per cent better CPU performance and 77 per cent graphics performance compared to last year’s Lunar Lake.
Those are some impressive theoretical numbers from the company’s 18A technology out of Arizona. For Intel, which has had its troubles in recent years, its latest release could be a much-needed win.
Gaming without a dedicated GPU
Aside from longer battery life and faster performance across the board, gaming is one of the major beneficiaries of the new chipset’s design. A live demo running a Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark saw an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop outperform a laptop with a discrete Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics card.
Upon closer inspection, both benchmarks ran at each laptop’s native display resolution, with the graphics set to ‘Ultra’. There was some upscaling involved; the Panther Lake laptop used Intel’s XeSS technology, while the RTX 4050-equipped device had DLSS on — the frame-generating kind, not the controversial DLSS 5 version.
Even so, for an integrated GPU to outperform a dedicated graphics card is no small feat. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 at its highest graphical settings at above 60 frames per second on a laptop’s integrated GPU would’ve been unheard of only a few years ago.
Considering the cost of graphics cards at the moment, made even worse by the global memory shortage, it’s just as well you can still play games without needing to shell out for a separate GPU.
A big driver of this graphical uplift is the new Core Ultra X7 and X9 chipsets, which are Intel’s top-of-the-line variants. They house 12 of Intel’s Xe GPU cores, compared to Lunar Lake’s maximum of eight, providing a decent year-on-year boost.
Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptops launch in Australia
Naturally, gaming is just one part of the new Intel range. Other demos included splitting music tracks (specifically “Thunderstruck”) into individual instrument stems in Audacity, while others showed local AI models quickly sorting through clips in Adobe Premiere Pro.
More than 200 devices will use Intel Core Ultra Series 3 SoCs throughout 2026. Some of those laptops are arriving in Australian retailers now, with new Acer, Asus, and HP models among them.
Of Intel’s recent processors, its Panther Lake range could be the company’s strongest entry in years, as the computing market only gets more competitive.
The post Intel’s powerful new chips could save us from pricey GPU hell appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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