Intel’s large launch for CES 2026 is its Core Extremely Sequence 3 of cell chips, based mostly on the Panther Lake structure it introduced in October. The brand new structure’s largest improve over the Core Extremely 200’s resides within the new Xe3 graphics cores that promise considerably higher efficiency at decrease energy draw than the Xe2 era in Lunar Lake, utilized by a number of the Core Extremely 200 variants. And the corporate briefly talked about there will be a future handheld console platform based mostly on Panther Lake. There are zero particulars now, however count on some later this 12 months.
A lot of the non-graphics features of Panther Lake embrace plenty of optimizations over earlier generations, plus a transfer to Intel’s smaller (2nm) 18A course of node, which ought to outcome within the related chips being higher total, drawing notably much less energy. The primary techniques incorporating the three Sequence processors start transport instantly.
New naming nomenclature comes with the territory. For one, it is now often called Sequence 3 — or perhaps I simply by no means known as the last-gen Sequence 2 — and there is a new “X” within the chip names to indicate the incorporation of the Arc Professional B390 graphics, which has the utmost variety of Xe3 cores (previously code-named 12Xe). It has Extremely 9 and Extremely 7 variations, and the latter options the GPU for which benchmark efficiency was leaked in November.
There is a Core Extremely 5 chip with Arc B370 graphics, which is not denoted by an X. I am nonetheless plowing by the chip lineup to make sense of it, as a result of all of the yay!-gaming efficiency they quote is for that Arc Professional GPU; there is no indication of how all the opposite chips will fare. The identical goes for Intel’s quote of 27 hours of battery life for streaming video; that is for an Arc Professional-equipped system as effectively.
Intel claims considerably larger gaming body charges, so long as you are making the most of XeSS 3 upscaling and gaming at 1080p. 1080p is ok, nevertheless it would not account for connecting to a higher-resolution exterior monitor, amongst different issues. XeSS 3 will embrace multi-frame-gen at launch, which makes use of AI to extrapolate a number of subsequent frames from a single.
Intel took a extra modular strategy to the GPU tiling association, which provides them extra flexibility for scaling efficiency up and all the way down to hit dimension, worth and energy necessities for particular person laptop computer producers.
Intel says preorders for the preliminary techniques begin Tuesday.
