Some new Intel Core Ultra 3 series processors can significantly improve gaming and battery life

Intel’s big launch for CES 2026 is its Core Ultra Series 3 of mobile chips, based on the Architecture of Panther Lake he announced in October. The biggest upgrade of the new architecture over the Core Ultra 200 is the new Xe3 graphics cores which promise significantly better performance with lower power consumption than the Core Ultra 200. Generation Xe2 at Lunar Lakeused by some of the Core Ultra 200 variants. And the company briefly mentioned that there would be a future handheld console platform based on Panther Lake. There are no details yet, but expect some later this year.

Much of the non-graphics aspects of Panther Lake include numerous optimizations over previous generations, as well as a move to Intel’s smaller (2nm) 18A process node, which should allow the affected chips to be better overall, consuming significantly less power. The first systems integrating Series 3 processors are released immediately.

A new naming nomenclature accompanies the territory. For one thing, it’s now known as the Series 3 – or maybe I just never called it the last-gen Series 2 – and there’s a new “X” in the chip names to indicate the incorporation of the Arc Pro B390 graphics, which have the maximum number of Xe3 cores (formerly named 12Xe). There are Ultra 9 and Ultra 7 versions, and the latter has the GPU for which the reference performance was leak in November.

There is a Core Ultra 5 chip with Arc B370 graphics, which is not marked with an X. I’m still going through the chip lineup to make sense of it, because all the gaming performance yay! that they quote are for this Arc Pro GPU; there is no indication of the fate of any other tokens. The same goes for Intel’s quote of 27 hours of battery life for video streaming; this also applies to a system equipped with Arc Pro.

Intel claims significantly higher gaming frame rates, provided you take advantage of XeSS 3 upscaling and gaming at 1080p. 1080p is nice, but that doesn’t take into account, among other things, connecting to a higher resolution external monitor. XeSS 3 will include multi-frame generation at launch, which uses AI to extrapolate multiple subsequent frames from a single one.

Intel has taken a more modular approach to GPU tile layout, giving them more flexibility to scale performance up and down to meet the size, price, and power requirements of different laptop manufacturers.

Intel says pre-orders for the initial systems begin Tuesday.