Back in October of last year, Intel officially announced Panther Lake, its next-generation mobile CPU lineup, which also goes by the name Core Ultra 3 Series. During its keynote aat CES 2026, it officially unveiled two more laptop SKUs: the Core Ultra X7 and X9.
Specifically, the Core Ultra X7 comes in two flavours, the 358H and 368H. Both feature a 16-core die, divided into four P-Cores, eight E-cores, and four LP E-Cores, with the main difference being their boost clocks of 4.8GHz and 5GHz, respectively.
The Core Ultra X9 model, the 388H serves as the top-of-the-line model, and features the same 16-cores configuration as the X7 SKUs. The main differentiator is the boost clock, which sits at 5.1GHz when running at full whack. This, including the two X7s, also runs with Intel’s latest ARC B390 Xe3 cores. Oh, and NPUs with 50 TOPs performance.
That brings to the second core announcement from Intel’s keynote: it’s new ARC B390 integrated graphics. Available only with the Core Ultra X7 and X9 models, the integrated graphics engine features 12 Xe3 cores, as well as 12 enhanced ray-tracing cores.
As for the performance of the Arc B390, Intel claims that it should perform on par with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 laptop GPU, and at a lower, sustained power draw of 45W at full load. That’s in comparison to the 60W TGP of the RTX 4050.
Intel also claims that a Core Ultra X9 with ARC B390 is also 73% faster and more power efficient than AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and its 53W power draw, but in all fairness, that is the bar Intel has to pull itself above.
The Core Ultra X7 and X9 CPUs are also able to support up to 96GB of LPDDR5x RAM, which is a massive jump in memory capacity support. Previously with Lunar Lake, Intel capped the RAM capacity to 32GB, and they were built directly into the die, by design. This choice of chip design was beneficial in many ways – battery life on a Lunar Lake laptop could go for as long as 22 hours on a full charge – but ultimately meant that one couldn’t expand it.
That being said, having a laptop with such a large amount of memory won’t be cheap because, as you well know, the entire industry is currently suffering from a shortage of consumer-grade memory, thanks to memory silicon makers shifting their production towards enterprise memory, as the boom for AI continues to surge.
In any case, Intel says that laptops running on its latest Panther Lake Core Ultra X7 and X9 CPUs should start shipping out from Q2 2026 onwards, with preorders already open.
