intel core ultra

Intel’s next-generation Panther Lake laptop chips could be a return to form

AMD, core ultra, CPUs, intel, intel core ultra, panther lake, Tech / 9u50fv / October 9, 2025

Intel says that systems with these chips in them should be shipping by the end of the year. In recent years, the company has launched a small handful of ultraportable-focused CPUs at the end of the year, and then followed that up with a more fully fleshed-out midrange and high-end lineup at CES in January—we’d expect Intel to stick to that basic approach here.

Panther Lake draws near

Panther Lake tries to combine different aspects of the last-generation Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips. Intel

Intel’s first Core Ultra chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, were introduced two years ago. There were three big changes that separated these from the 14th-generation Core CPUs and their predecessors: They were constructed of multiple silicon tiles, fused together into one with Intel’s Foveros packaging technologies; some of those tiles were manufactured by TSMC rather than Intel; and they added a neural processing unit (NPU) that could be used for on-device machine learning and generative AI applications.

The second-generation Core Ultra chips continued to do all three of those things, but Intel pursued an odd bifurcated strategy that gave different Core Ultra 200-series processors significantly different capabilities.

The most interesting models, codenamed Lunar Lake (aka Core Ultra 200V), integrated the system RAM on the CPU package, which improved performance and power consumption while making them more expensive to buy and complicated to manufacture. These chips included Intel’s most up-to-date Arc GPU architecture, codenamed Battlemage, plus an NPU that met the performance requirements for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative.

But Core Ultra 200V chips were mostly used in high-end thin-and-light laptops. Lower-cost and higher-performance laptops got the other kind of Core Ultra 200 chip, codenamed Arrow Lake, which was a mishmash of old and new. The CPU cores used the same architecture as Lunar Lake, and there were usually more of them. But the GPU architecture was older and slower, and the NPU didn’t meet the requirements for Copilot+. If Lunar Lake was all-new, Arrow Lake was mostly an updated CPU design fused to a tweaked version of the original Meteor Lake design (confused by all these lakes yet? Welcome to my world).

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Intel is testing BIOS updates to fix performance of its new Core Ultra 200S CPUs

Without tuned power profiles, a separate but related feature called the Intel Application Performance Optimizer (APO) couldn’t kick in, reducing performance by between 2 and 14 percent.

Current BIOS updates for motherboards contain optimized performance and power settings that “were not consistently toggled” in early BIOS versions for those boards. This could also affect performance by between 2 and 14 percent.

The fifth and final fix for the issues Intel has identified is coming in a later BIOS update that the company plans to release “in the first half of January 2025.” The microcode updates in that BIOS update should provide “another modest performance improvement in the single-digit range,” based on Intel’s performance testing across 35 games. When that microcode update (version 0x114) has been released, Intel says it plans to release another support document with more detailed performance comparisons.

If a long Intel support document detailing a multi-stage series of fixes for elusive performance issues is giving you deja vu, you’re probably thinking about this other, more serious problem with 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs from earlier this year. In that case, the issue was that the CPU could request more voltage than it could handle, eventually leading to degraded performance and crashes.

These voltage requests could permanently damage the silicon, so Intel extended the warranties of most 13th- and 14th-gen Core CPUs from three years to five. The company also worked with motherboard makers to release a string of BIOS updates to keep the problems from happening again. A similar string of BIOS updates will be necessary to fix the problems with the Core Ultra 200S chips.