Intel Announces Core Ultra Series 3 Mobile Processors

On the opening day of CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Intel announced its Core Ultra Series 3 chips for mobile PCs. Codenamed Panther Lake, these chips will be at least partially built on the 2 nm Intel 18A process in the United States.

“With Series 3, we are laser-focused on improving power efficiency, adding more CPU performance, a bigger GPU in a class of its own, more AI compute and app compatibility you can count on with x86,” Intel senior vice president Jim Johnson said.

With Series 3, Intel is scaling the family of chips up and down. On the lower end, there will be edge processors certified for embedded and industrial use cases and non-Ultra Core processors for lower-end PCs. And on the high end, Intel will ship a new class of Core Ultra X9 and X7 processors with more powerful Arc graphics aimed at advanced workloads like gaming, creation, and productivity.

Intel claims big performance and efficiency gains for Series 3, with the highest-end SKUs offering 60 percent better multithreaded performance, 77 percent faster gaming performance, a 50 TOPS NPU, and up to 27 hours of battery life.

The first PCs running Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors will arrive on January 27, Intel says. I’ve been previewing one of those PCs for the past month and can attest to the performance gains, at least, though reliability remains an issue. I’ll have more on that in late January.