A leaked shipping manifest suggests that Panther Lake chips will come with 50% more Xe cores which would theoretically lead to significantly better graphics performance compared to Lunar Lake. Panther Lake chips will come with Xe3 cores, said to be more performant than the current generation Xe2 cores.
Panther Lake is Intel’s next-generation mobile CPU and the first to be based on the company’s 18A process. This makes the upcoming chip a big deal for Intel as it will showcase how competitive it can be against industry giant TSMC and its 2nm manufacturing process. Even though real-world performance numbers are in the distant future, a new leak hints at the upgraded iGPU that is said to offer significantly better graphics performance, setting the Panther Lake chips as solid gaming handheld SoCs.
The information is based on an alleged leaked shipping manifest spotted by X user X86 is dead&back. The document shows that Panther Lake chips, or at least some of them, feature 12 Xe3 graphics cores. For comparison, the Lunar Lake chips feature eight Xe2 cores. This gives the Panther Lake chips 50% more cores and seeing as how the Xe3 cores are an upgrade over the Xe2 cores, each core should be more performant.
This would lead to impressive gaming performance if installed effectively in a handheld. Furthermore, back in May at Computex 2025, Intel demoed its Panther Lake chips and they were rendering in real-time, as well as running AI applications. This could mean that the iGPU supports AI upscaling, something unique to the Panther Lake iGPU for now. If a handheld were to be powered by a Panther Lake chip with a more powerful iGPU and AI-upscaling support, it would theoretically result in superior gaming performance, a level beyond what the current generation handhelds offer.
Panther Lake is scheduled to ship in the second half of 2025. Back in March, it was reported that the Panther Lake notebooks have been delayed to 2026 because the mass production timeline was postponed from early September 2025 to mid-Q4 2025. This, however, still meets Intel’s initial production timeline of 2H 2025.
Related Articles
Vineet Washington – Tech Writer – 338 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2025
I have always been passionate about gaming and technology, which drove me towards pursuing a career in the tech writing industry. I have spent over 7 years in the tech space and about a decade in content writing. I hope to continue to use this passion and generate informative, entertaining, and accurate content for readers.
Vineet Washington, 2025-07-29 (Update: 2025-07-29)
