Intel finally seems ready to compete with AMD’s fastest mobile chips again. New benchmarks for the upcoming Core Ultra X9 388H – part of the “Panther Lake” family – have just leaked, and the numbers are surprisingly strong.
Even though it was just a technical example, it already matches the single-core speed of AMD’s top-of-the-line “Strix Halo” processors and shows a significant increase in multi-core performance compared to Intel’s current lineup.
What the benchmarks reveal about Intel’s new flagship
A new Geekbench leak gives us a glimpse of this chip’s performance, and on paper it’s a beast. The X9 388H achieved a single-core score of 3,057 and a multi-core score of 17,687.
To put that in perspective, the single-core speed is basically on par with AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395, the current frontrunner in mobile AI chips. It’s also about 15% faster than Intel’s current high-end chip, the Core Ultra 9 285H.
What’s impressive here isn’t just the sheer speed; it is efficiency. While AMD’s chips run hot in high-wattage cases, Intel hits those numbers with a base TDP of 45W. That means we could finally get peak performance in thin and light laptops without sacrificing battery life.
The chip uses a 16-core hybrid layout (mix of performance and efficiency cores) and accelerates up to 5.1 GHz. Additionally, initial testing suggests that the integrated graphics (Arc B390) will be scary good, with performance close to a dedicated RTX 3050 laptop GPU.
Why this matters, why you should care, and what comes next
In recent years, Intel has caught up in terms of efficiency and integrated graphics. These numbers suggest that Panther Lake could actually flip the script, giving Windows laptops the kind of battery life and graphics performance we typically only see from Apple or AMD.
What this means for you is that your next laptop may not need a bulky dedicated graphics card to play games or edit videos. It could offer excellent performance in a much thinner and cooler package.
Of course, benchmarks are just numbers until we see actual laptops in the wild. We’ll have to see how these chips handle heat and sustained workloads in the real world. However, with launch scheduled for 2025, it looks like the laptop market is about to get extremely competitive again.
