Intel has revealed its 18A Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 laptop chips; preorders start January 6th, devices ship January 27th, 2026. Xe3 graphics, upgraded NPU (50 TOPS), up to 16 cores, big multithread, gaming, and battery boosts.

Intel is stepping up its focus on gaming hardware with plans for a new chip and platform designed specifically for portable gaming devices. The announcement was made at the Consumer

Intel Corp. showed off laptop computers based on processors with a new design, part of the chipmaker’s effort to make its products competitive again.

The non-X Intel Core Ultra 9 386H has a slightly lower max P-core frequency at 4.9 GHz, although thanks to its weedy four Xe-core iGPU, it's got eight more PCIe lanes to play with—which will mean it's better suited to laptops with discrete GPUs, at least for gaming purposes.

Much of the non-graphics aspects of Panther Lake include a lot of optimizations over previous generations, plus a move to Intel's smaller (2nm) 18A process node, which should result in the relevant chips being better overall, drawing notably less power. The first systems incorporating the 3 Series processors begin shipping immediately.

Intel Corp. shares fell Wednesday after a report said that Nvidia Corp. halted a test to use Intel’s production process to make advanced chips.

Geoffrey Seiler has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Apple, Intel, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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