If you’re looking to pick up the latest and greatest gaming processor, it might be worth holding fire for a little while.
The new Panther Lake processor, the Intel Core Ultra 9 386H, has popped up on Geekbench, packed into an Acer Predator gaming laptop, and is expected to be a flagship chip for Intel’s 2026 lineup.
The chip, which includes 4 Xe3 cores instead of the 12 of the Ultra X9, is focused on gaming, and its appearance here lines up with an expected appearance at CES.
Panther Lake benchmarks are in
There are still some caveats to cover before we get into the raw numbers. For one, this is in-development hardware, so there’s every chance it’s not hitting the numbers it could in a few months.
Then there’s the fact that the Core Ultra 9 386H doesn’t pair with integrated graphics, and we don’t know which GPU it’s attached to in the new Acer Predator model.
With all that said, Videocardz has shared the numbers, and it’s looking mighty impressive already. There’s a 2.1 GHz base clock speed, while boosted reach 4.72 GHz - lower than the anticipated 4.9Ghz.
As the report points out, this processor already eclipses its predecessor, the Arrow Lake-H flagship Core Ultra 9 285H, with 9% faster single-thread speeds and 4% faster multi-thread speeds. While it’s behind the Core Ultra X9 388H, that chip is the uber top of the line offering with 24 cores with its own integrated GPU.
Outlook
While 9 or 4% might not feel like a significant jump, chip development has reached a pretty swift release cadence, and according to Videocardz, we're still getting the same TDP.
That means we're getting additional performance at the same power efficiency, which should mean games on upcoming laptops will be more performative without draining quite as much battery charge as older generations.
Expect the new Panther Lake chips to be shown off at CES, along with the models we'll find them in.
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