- A leak has appeared for the rumored Intel Core Ultra X7 358H
- This Panther Lake CPU is shown with a strong Geekbench graphics score
- That’s better than a previous leak by 7%, indicating that Intel’s driver tweaking is coming along well with Panther Lake
Intel’s incoming Panther Lake notebook CPUs are once again generating excitement as another leak paints a picture of speedy chips when it comes to graphics and gaming.
As Wccftech reports, this is a Geekbench leak for the Core Ultra X7 358H 16-core CPU, a Panther Lake offering in a Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro that someone benchmarked.
The Core Ultra X7 358H has Xe3 integrated graphics – meaning Battlemage (B390) – and managed to hit a score of 57,000 in the OpenCL test, which is actually quite smart. It’s also remarkably 7% faster than a previous Geekbench leak for this Core Ultra X7 358H processor.
Why the significant improvement? That’s due to Intel’s tweaking and driver improvements to the GPU as it gets closer to release. Panther Lake is expected to debut in laptops in early 2026, and the exciting thing here is that we could have more performance boosts before these mobile CPUs are in notebooks on the shelves.
The rumored spec of the Core Ultra X7 358H is that the chip has a 12-core Xe3 integrated GPU, with the processor itself having four performance cores, eight efficiency cores and four low-power inserts, for a total of 16 cores. (Even if you ignore the low-power cores, which are small, it’s a 12-core processor).
Analysis: Panther Lake promise
With the Xe3 integrated graphics hitting the 57k mark in OpenCL, this means the Panther Lake CPU outperforms the RTX 3050 discrete laptop GPU by over 10% or so. In other words, we’re looking at something similar to the RTX 3050 Ti here, and if we get further performance improvements before the launch of Panther Lake, this Xe3 GPU could even edge out the standalone Nvidia GPU.
This once again illustrates the kind of leaps being made with graphics solutions built into processors, allowing for very thin and light gaming laptops that can be more affordable. Keep in mind that a standalone GPU takes up space in a laptop’s chassis, requires more effort around cooling, and also pushes up the overall cost of the device.
Not to mention that the Xe3 graphics here use far less watts than an Nvidia RTX 3050 typically does – which is 60W to 80W, whereas the entire chip only uses that with the Core Ultra X7 358H (depending on the laptop’s configuration in both cases). This should translate into significantly better battery life with Intel’s Arc integrated solution, there’s no doubt about that.
Granted, Geekbench isn’t the first benchmark I’d turn to when assessing the gaming capabilities of any graphics card, but it does give an indication of where the performance levels for the GPU lie. In fact, we can see synthetic gaming benchmarks – or actual in-game tests – show that this Panther Lake chip has even more power to offer than suggested here.
This upcoming line of mobile processors from Intel looks to be a strong contender to seriously spice up budget gaming laptops in terms of both efficiency (battery) and performance. In fact, they’ll be even better news for handhelds, which are still more confined within the claustrophobic confines of their compact form factors.
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