New reports state that Intel is working to improve Xe3 performance on its upcoming Panther Lake processor while also investigating stability issues. Built on the 18A process node, Panther Lake has been designed for high-end laptops. A recently leaked shipping manifest indicates that Intel has already begun shipping to Samsung, presumably for its Galaxy Book laptops, and so there are some folks who’ve already had them in hand for testing.
Panther Lake, Samsung, Laptop pic.twitter.com/Qg1Z0j6vn7
— X86 is dead&back (@x86deadandback) September 8, 2025
Posts on GitLab (via Phoronix) from Intel software engineer Kevron Rees have shown some interesting game testing data. It would appear that there have been some unusual Xe3 GPU hangups with various games and, in particular, with Cyberpunk 2077, which led to it being omitted from the overall results. It was disclosed that Intel has released 14 patches for the Mesa 3D graphics driver, providing up to 18% in performance gains while also improving system stability.
“This series addresses a number of compiler-related performance problems that would have affected xe3 platforms and led to less than ideal performance in most GPU workloads.”
-Francisco Jerez, Intel Engineer
“The biggest downside is that the compile-time cost of this series is substantial in the ball-park of 25% for shader-db, but most of the compile-time impact is concentrated in the last patch that re-enables the static analysis-based SIMD32 heuristic on xe3 — Overall this gives back most of the gain in compile-time we had made by switching the SIMD32 heuristic while enabling VRT on xe3. However when combined with the performance analysis extensions to make it model the behavior of xe3 that last patch gives the largest performance benefit in the series, so despite its cost it seems to me that reverting to static analysis on xe3 is the best trade-off for the time being (see the individual commit messages for compile- and run-time test results broken up by commit).”
-Francisco Jerez, Intel Engineer
Neither Samsung nor any other laptop manufacturer has yet to formally announce any new products featuring Panther Lake, but that could occur by the holidays or early 2026. It’s quite probable manufacturers will begin announcing at or around the time of CES 26. According to a recently leaked SKU list from Coreboot, Panther Lake, aka Core Ultra 300, will comprise four SKUs: a standard, base, premium, and Super model. SKU configurations have also been extrapolated from this list.
Per Wcfftech:
- 4+8+4Xe (4 P-Cores + 8 E-Cores + 4 Xe3 iGPU Cores)
- 4+8+12Xe (4 P-Cores + 8 E-Cores + 12 Xe3 iGPU Cores)
- 4+0+4Xe (4 P-Cores + 0 E-Cores + 4 Xe3 iGPU Cores)
- 2+0+4Xe (2 P-Cores + 0 E-Cores + 4 Xe3 iGPU Cores)