The legacy chipmaker launched the Core Ultra Series 3 processors (codenamed Panther Lake) at this year’s CES as Intel’s first mobile platform built on the advanced Intel 18A process node – its biggest process innovation – making a strong case for its Core Ultra Series 3 processors in the AI PC race.
We grew up with “Intel Inside” stickers on our PCs, a branding that made an invisible component a household symbol of trust and raw performance. Yet recent years brought turbulence, with rivals like Qualcomm squeezing Intel’s core market. Backed by Washington and crucial partnerships with titans like Nvidia, Intel is regaining its operational stride.
Today, under the leadership of Lip-Bu Tan, the turnaround seems real.
Intel also points to its AI PC platform, which it says supports more than 500 optimised AI models. The company says over 100 independent software vendors (ISVs) are engaged in optimising software for AI PCs.
Thunderbolt 4 and 5: Integration of these standards delivers up to 120 Gbps of bandwidth.
Intel says these are areas where mobile-first architectures still face compatibility gaps. Intel says this is supported natively across its platforms but is not available on mobile-first architectures. Intel says content creators working with high-resolution footage get faster export times, without the CPU load that software encoding demands.
Gaming is another area Intel highlights. Its x86 architecture works with the full Windows gaming ecosystem. That includes anti-cheat software, older titles, specialised controllers and peripheral drivers. Meanwhile, Snapdragon uses ARM architecture to maximise battery life and efficiency at the expense of gaming performance. Moreover, Snapdragon delivers Copilot+ AI experiences – the major difference is that Intel brings those AI experiences to the full Windows ecosystem – with native compatibility for the applications, peripherals, management tools, and developer workflows that businesses and creators already rely on. It supports fast data transfer, daisy-chained displays and universal docking. Intel Quick Sync Video: This enables hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding directly on the processor.
On the performance side, Intel says Core Ultra Series 3 delivers up to 180 TOPS of total AI compute.
In practice, Intel says this keeps performance steady when several tasks run at once, such as content creation, AI inferencing, video calls and background processes. This comes from the CPU, GPU and NPU working together. The company explains that this mixed design sends each AI workload to the most efficient processing engine for the job, instead of depending on one type of processor.