A new leak regarding Intel’s upcoming Panther Lake mobile processors has shed some light on the performance we can expect, and the results are not bright. According to some Cinebench R23 tests conducted by Laptopreview, the Core Ultra X7 358H and Ultra 5 338H are slower than their predecessors in CPU performance. Interesting.
To be exact, the Core Ultra X7 358H is reportedly netting around 20,000 points in Cinebench R23’s multicore tests, with the Core Ultra 5 338H coming slightly behind at roughly 16,000 points. In a vacuum, these are not bad scores by any means; however, when comparing them to the 21,826 points of the present Core Ultra 7 255H at 65W and 22,578 points at 80W, the Core Ultra X 358H seems lacklustre. The same goes for the Core Ultra 5 338H, which gets surpassed by the older Core Ultra 5 225H and its 16,466 points.
That said, Laptopreview only shared rough scores, which may not be completely accurate. Worst case, this performance is perfectly serviceable, especially considering the much larger iGPU.
On that subject, the leak also contained 3DMark Time Spy results, where the Core Ultra X7 358H achieved 6,830 points, i.e. 72% faster than the Core Ultra 7 255H’s 3,956 points. This isn’t surprising considering the 50% difference in GPU cores (8 vs. 12) and the former’s use of the latest Xe3 graphics architecture. To put it otherwise, this is higher than the performance you would expect from an RTX 3050 Max-Q mobile GPU at 60W.
Looking at this, the larger iGPU may have come at the cost of the CPU performance. If not in silicon allocation, then the power budget could be the cause for this lower CPU performance. The shared 60W of the Core Ultra X7 358H may not be enough to feed both the CPU and GPU cores. What is sure is that the Core Ultra X7 358H will be able to hold its ground in thin laptops, which often lack a dedicated GPU.
At the end of the day, these are still early tests, and things are subject to change. So, while these first benchmarks look underwhelming, there is still hope for optimisations arriving just in time for launch.
