Only X2 elite is actually bringing measurable / meaningful change this gen tbh. Even their slowest SKU is only 20% slower in igpu adreno performance compared to their flagship extreme variant.

It feels like arm is catching up or closing the gap atleast but x86 remains stagnant. Whenever there is progress it's either not widely available or too expensive (2500+) making it irrelevant.

Most games boot now without crashing  too through the x86 to arm windows prism translation layer thanks to supporting avx and avx2 instruction set support. Altho there are some rough edge cases (e.g. poor perf in a** creed shadows) still and theyre still only catching up to essentially z1e 780m performance from years ago in terms of igpu.

But their efficiency in terms of wattage, noise, heat and perf. whole on battery with very little to almost no throttling can't be touched.

QuoteLenovo releases new 14-inch laptop earlier than expected with Intel Panther Lake

Good for them. The later in the year PantherLake products are released, the more unlikely people are gonna buy it - especially because NovaLake is around the corner. Besides PantherLake is only an "in-between-generation" (or a beta-run) while NovaLake is a main generation, where manufacturers generally put more effort into and produce more devices.

PantherLake products on the market are also a joke. There are only a couple of laptops available, which are the exact same ones presented on CES2026, and nothing else. It's even worse with PantherLake NUCs: There are still no NUCs available for purchase outside of China. Even though a NUC is much easier to produce than a laptop. If they arrive in September, no one's gonna  care about them anymore. In my opinion they might as well skip PantherLake products entirely, instead of wasting more resources. Though I would like if they stated that publicly, so people would not wait for such products any longer.

Quote from: Terror Byte on Today at 02:37:17So many of the Panther Lake SKU's are a waste of sand.

I agree with that. The huge amount of different and yet very similar SKUs is absolutely nonsense. And also that they skipped the whole "middle" section, and instead only offer extreme ends like 2-4 Xe units or 12 Xe units. It's probably on purpose because of some twisted logic of theirs.

So many of the Panther Lake SKU's are a waste of sand. The 322 and 325 are trash, the 355 is no better than than the Lunar Lake 258V but you pay a lot more.

WHy did they not have something like:

388H 6+8+4 + 12Xe3
378H the same but lower clocks
368H 4+8+4 + 12Xe3
358H same but lower clocks
386H 6+6+4 + 10Xe3
376H same but lower clocks
348H 4+4+4 10Xe3
338H same but lower clocks
336H 4+4+4 + 8Xe3
326H same but lower clocks

Then you have bunch of 4+4+4+4Xe or 2+4+4+4Xe3 for your entry level