We’re only a week out from Intel’s big Panther Lake reveal and someone’s already put the architecture’s graphics to the test. Better still, these results concern the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H, giving us a glimpse of the new silicon at its best.
Before diving into the benchmark results, here’s a briefer on the chip in question. Core Ultra X9 388H comes complete with 12 Xe3 cores, representing a 50% generational leap in count. Greater in number but also quality, as Celestial (Xe3) will offer architectural improvements over Battlemage (Xe2).
Finally, on the processing side, Core Ultra X9 388H arrives with 16 cores (4P+8E+4LPE). Once again, there’s no Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) support, so thread count remains 1:1 with core. The chip supports LPDDR5X RAM speeds up to 9,600MT/s but frequencies will vary as Intel isn’t soldering memory on to Panther Lake, unlike Lunar Lake.
Running in tandem with a 9,600MT/s kit, Core Ultra X9 388H accrued a 3DMark Time Spy graphics score of 6,300pts. This result comes by way of LaptopReview, who also claim that the processor was also able to achieve 6,233pts using 8,533MT/s RAM. In turn, this would represent a ~50% improvement over Lunar Lake at its best.
While comparisons to laptop graphics feel erroneous given differences in TGP. However, LaptopReview highlights this would put Core Ultra X9 388H somewhere between RTX 3050 and GTX 1660 Ti Mobile graphics running at 60W.
Exciting as these results are, it’s important to note that these are almost certainly using pre-release drivers that are a far cry from what the retail release will look like. This doesn’t necessarily mean we should expect a smaller generational leap, though, just that they’re not reflective of final Core Ultra X9 388H performance.
It’s clear that Intel is keen to build on the success of Lunar Lake and Xe2 via Panther Lake and Xe3. I’m particularly keen to see how the company’s graphics innovations take shape across markets, with successors to Claw 8 AI+ and Arc B580 seeming inevitable at this point.
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