"Today's Users No Longer Fit Into a Single Category": Akshay Kamath on Intel's Panther Lake

Intel hasn't had an easy couple of years. A rough stretch of missteps and leadership churn left a lot of people wondering if the company had lost its way. From the headlines, you'd think Intel was in real trouble.

It wasn't, quite. The chips still shipped, the data center money kept coming, and everything rode on 18A, the new process behind the turnaround. What Intel really lost was the benefit of the doubt. Panther Lake is the first consumer chip on 18A, which is why it's meant to show Intel still has it.

So I lived with it. The same Panther Lake chip, the Core Ultra X7 358H, sits inside two laptops I've been using for the last month: the Dell XPS 14 and the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro. I also asked Akshay Kamath, Director - Enterprise Client and Data Center Category from Intel India, a few questions around Panther Lake. Here's what he had to say.

The everyday stuff just works

Intel calls Panther Lake "a structural shift over Lunar Lake," and Kamath frames the appeal around doing many things at once. "Today's users no longer fit into a single category," he told me. "A single device is expected to support productivity, content creation, communication, and even AI-driven workflows seamlessly." Intel quotes gains of up to 60% on CPU and 77% on graphics over last year, though those are its own figures against its own older chip, so take them for what they are.

What I'll vouch for is the feel of it. On both laptops, normal work never once became a topic. A dozen Chrome tabs, multiple 4K video playback, Sheets running alongside, Premiere and Photoshop idling in the background, and neither machine so much as hiccupped. You'd hope so at this price, but the chip handles it without making a fuss.

Where it gets interesting

Both laptops run the exact same chip and 32GB of RAM, so whatever gap shows up comes down to how Dell and Samsung tuned them. In Cinebench 2024, the XPS 14 managed 124 single-core and 681 multi-core, the best single-core figure in my whole comparison set. The Galaxy Book 6 Pro landed at 113 and 623, then turned it around in Geekbench 6 multi-core, pulling 16,177 to the XPS 14's 14,789. Samsung clearly lets the chip stretch a bit more before reining it in.

The graphics are the bit I'd actually point you to. Kamath doesn't undersell it: he says the integrated Arc B390 "delivers gaming performance similar to an Nvidia 4050 laptop," the kind of thing that "enables students to run demanding graphics and AI projects on the integrated GPU and then wind down the day by playing popular esports and AAA titles."

That roughly tracks with what I saw. With a few tweaks and upscaling, games like Cyberpunk 2077 and 007 First Light run at around 70fps. The compute side lines up with it too: both laptops scored around 56,000 in Geekbench 6's GPU test, while every rival's integrated graphics in my group sat near 29,000 to 30,000. That's nearly twice the result. Moreover, it handles a 4K timeline with a few MOGRT files well, so editing an Instagram Reel is no problem.

The bit that matters most

This is where 18A earns its place. Kamath credits the new process with letting systems "maintain consistent performance over longer durations without hitting thermal or power limits," and even floats "multi-day battery life on video streaming workloads" in the right designs. Reality was more grounded and still quite good, and more importantly, reliable. The XPS 14 gave me about 12 hours of screen time across two days of writing and browsing on its 70Whr battery, and the Galaxy Book 6 Pro lasted for 23 hours in our battery testing benchmark, which is exceptional. Both drop off slightly faster once you pile on heavy editing, so don't plan a flight's worth of Premiere around them. But for a full working day away from a plug, this is exactly the endurance Intel needed to put on the table.

So has Intel actually pulled it off? On what I've seen, mostly yes. Panther Lake is efficient, it's quick, and the graphics genuinely stand apart from the pack. It won't choose your laptop for you; the XPS 14 and the Galaxy Book 6 Pro feel quite different to live with despite running the same chip, but it does mean the thing inside is no longer the part you need to worry about. After the couple of years Intel's had, that's the whole point.