Did Intel Finally Get It Right? ⭐

Intel's Panther Lake introduction at CES was impressive. But so was its Lunar Lake introduction 18 months ago, and we all know how that turned out. Did Intel finally get it right, or is Panther Lake just a case of two steps forward, one step sideways?

Apologies for ruining the premise of this article's title, but it's too early to say with any certainty. Those who attended CES were able to interact with apps and games on Panther Lake-based PCs and observe or run benchmarks. But that was while those PCs were plugged into power, and one of the big issues with Lunar Lake is that performance drops off a cliff when the system is on battery.
The caveat
As for me, I've been using a Panther Lake-based laptop, the HP OmniBook Ultra, and I am now using it full time ahead of my full review. Based solely on the games I've played so far---mostly Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, but also Silent Hill f and Battlefield 6---Intel's GPU performance gain claims appear to have some merit, though there's an important asterisk to that we need to discuss.

The bigger deal to me, and this is one that has plagued Intel CPUs dating back to the 11th or 12th generation Intel Core chips, was particularly problematic with Lunar Lake. And that's reliability, a monster that raises its ugly head in all kinds of ways, but most obviously when you just open the lid, spin the wheel, and see which experience you get. It's all over the map, and that's been true of this one Panther Lake laptop too.

And that's yet another caveat: I only have a single Panther Lake laptop made by a single PC maker and it may or may not be representative of what this chipset is like now or three, six, or 12 months in the future. I need, we all need, more evidence, more experience, and a wider range of PCs before we can issue any ruling.
What Intel announced
That last bit, too, is important. Now that I've watched the full Intel press conference at which it announced Panther Lake, or the Core Ultra Series 3 series of chips, I can see that Intel will be all over the map on Panther Lake chip configurations, with multiple SKUs, or models, each with different core configurations and other differences. Panther Lake isn't one thing, it's a big family of products, and there will be more in the future, as Intel previewed that it's bringing a Panther Lake variant to gaming handheld PCs too.

So, yes, Intel offered a confident outlook for this generation of chips at the introduction. But, as a reminder, it offered a nearly identically confident outlook at its Lunar Lake introduction, and that turned out to be all smoke and mirrors. And I have to just comment on Intel as a company.

Intel's humbling in recent years is overdue and well-deserved. And I can't agree with those who think it somehow deserves to survive, let alone thrive, given the market abuses it engaged in to extend and maintain its dominance over so many years. We need fewer companies like the old Intel in our industry, not more of the...