Intel shows Panther Lake in action and… ARCade slot machine

At Computex 2025, Intel showed Panther Lake and revealed new details about the upcoming chips. Meanwhile, something strange was found in the water of the company’s campus — the future of Arc graphics cards?

Intel has shown the Panther Lake Core Ultra 300 working processor for laptops, which is the company’s first chips on the 18A process. Unlike the previous public demonstration at CES 2025, Intel tested Panther Lake in real-time rendering and artificial intelligence applications, proving it is ready for to be released in early 2026. The company also shared additional information on the performance and power consumption of the new chips.

According to Intel, Panther Lake combines the energy efficiency of Lunar Lake with the performance of Arrow Lake-H. The processors will be produced in the second half of 2025, but they will not appear in devices until early 2026. Intel hints that the chips will feature next-generation XMX integrated graphics with performance closer to Lunar Lake than Arrow Lake.

Intel tested Panther Lake on two reference hardware platforms (RVPs), both of which were equipped with a heatsink and fan as high as 9000 rpm, — presumably they were running without thermal limitations. One of the systems demonstrated the work of Microsoft’s Clippy assistant, recently revived as a large language model. The speaker used the system to write game code in Python. However, Intel did not share the benchmark performance indicators. The exhibition also featured a developer’s kit and laptops from partners running the new platform.

Some characteristics of the new chips could be seen on the test systems. The processor had 16 cores and 16 threads, the base frequency was listed at 2.0 GHz, and the processor was running at about 3 GHz. However, it should be borne in mind that these are very early samples — reviewers expect 5 GHz+ in the final product. The processor is equipped with a cache of 1.6 MB L1, 24 MB L2 and 18 MB L3.

Meanwhile, a somewhat unusual device was photographed at one of Intel’s campuses — an ARCade slot machine with an Alchemist Arc A7 series graphics card. The machine did not seem to be working.

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— Haze (@Haze2K1) May 15, 2025

The setup is connected to a NUC Extreme PC, likely the NUC 11 Extreme that Intel has used in previous Arc A770 demonstrations. Intel is sometimes capable of flashy marketing solutions, but such efforts fade away as soon as the products are released — devices are likely to stop working due to lack of maintenance and drivers.

Sources and photos: Tom’s Hardware, Wccftech, VideoCardz