Intel's Panther Lake Chip is its biggest win in years | Hacker News Reader

Intel's Panther Lake Chip is its biggest win in years

wired.com

32 pointsteleforce21 comments

The headline is odd to me given that the article spent so much time comparing it to M5 and still loses considerably to the M5 in single core (199 vs 130).

And it only wins in multi-core simply because it has 16-cores while the M5 base only has 10-cores.

When Apple launches the M5 Pro and/or Ultra this won't be the case.

The reviewed laptop is 14" 32GB 1TB $1,299.

14-inch MacBook Pro M5 with 24GB $1,999.

Intel is -35% price, +60% cores, and most importantly given the 4x prices +33% RAM.

And you can run Windows games and Linux on it.

The reviewed MSI looks like a great 2-in-1, but a laptop is also more than its CPU and RAM. The MBP's screen has substantially higher resolution and brightness and refresh rate, for instance. I'm not saying the MSI isn't a good deal, just that it's not reasonable to compare the prices of two laptops like that.

Yes you can, because if the user wanted a better screen, he would likely have purchased a laptop with a better screen. You can buy any sort of screen you want in an x86 laptop, from really crappy to better-than-Mac.

You're not comparing the price of the Intel chip that way, though, which is what GP did.

The vast majority of the PC computing world still uses Windows, which doesn’t run on Macs, and Windows on ARM is still in its infancy. An Intel-based chip that’s on par with Apple Silicon is much desired by the marketplace.

AMD is already serving that segment, and quite successfully, too. I would assume Panther Lake is an improvement for Intel, most notably in the I/O department, but is it really "on par" even with the recent Ryzen variants, let alone Apple Silicon?

You don't get 22 hours of battery life out of a Ryzen laptop.

You don't get 22 hours of battery life out of any laptop. Maybe when it sits idle, but we usually turn our laptops on to do something.

People are getting 15 hours of life doing real work on Linux on Lunar Lake laptops, and Panther Lake is supposed to be better.

Obviously if you're gaming you get less, but the 22 hours that Intel claims and the 22 hours that Apple claims should be roughly comparable.

I can buy this and install whatever OS I like, though. And I am pretty sure I will 100% own the hardware.

How is Linux support on the M5? There is more to a CPU or system than a single benchmark number.

Ashai linux people are still working on support. They just posted support for M3.

So it's useless to me.

You could contribute to the Ashai project if them not yet spending their OSS time budget on the latest m-series chip when they have a backlog is such a problem for you.

The problem is Apple's vertically integration of their software and hardware without much of the public documents make it very hard to develop open source for. And the fisaco between the wider Linux kernel community and Rust camp, of course. marcan quit because of the Rust drama last year (just one year ceremony recently ironically) in Linux kernel.

PS: btw I'm of the anti-Rust in Linux kernel camp. I'm a Rust enthusiast, but I just don't believe Linux kernel is the right place.

It's 2026 and there is still no Cargo support to build kernel modules. You still need to make linker script hacks to add the object file into the makefiles, and you tell me that is "out of experimental status". I asked for Cargo support in 2020 IIRC and it is still not here...oh boy.

That means dependencies still have to be vendored by hand-picking and we cannot rely on scanning the dependency graph for GPL.

Redox would fare much better.

Or he could buy a laptop with a slightly slower chip which runs well with Linux and not pay money and his time for privilege of supporting a company building incompatible products.

I think Apple’s chip prowess is completely hampered by the fact that I’m buying hardware that is measurably less mine than the lesser x86 chips on the market that I can actually do whatever I want with.

I don’t really care how many hours their laptops last compared to Windows and Linux machines anymore.

I can’t put a price on user freedom. Even if I could, it’s far from negligible.

Apple has chipped away for years at user freedom. It’s an entire tooling and infrastructural development built from intentional strategy. Not a marginal price difference.

Billions of dollars were invested in removing our ability to do common tasks.

Unfortunately Intel also isn't interested in making Panther Lake:

> "We can’t completely vacate the client market," said Zinsner, but Intel is "shifting as much as we can over to data center to meet the high demand."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/core-ultra-series-3-...

So many smart best things going on on PL. Xe3 GPU looks amazing, especially the 12 core one. I love the extra low power core on the soc chiplet, allowing the main CPU chiplet to post down. Intel's EIMB is great, such an advanced interconnect for low power multi-chip. 18a and backside power. Excellent stuff!

Hard to blame them though for abandoning consumer market, like is happening with the entire rest of the computing market. Why make cores if the rest of the computer is too ghastly expensive to afford?

Note that parts of this line are still manufactured by TSMC. Intel is still not there in terms of fab self-sufficiency.

Given the timing, it's unlikely this generation of Intel integrated graphics makes use of Nvidia RTX chips. So, the gain on integrated graphics this generation seems impressive, given that graphics isn't Intel's strong suit.

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