Intel dominates the top end of PassMark’s price performance rankings in a way that would have seemed unlikely just a few years ago. Looking at the current leaderboard, Intel places seven CPUs in the top ten when performance is measured against price.

The chiplet-based approach allows Intel to mix-and-match these tiles to offer three distinct iterations of Panther Lake: the 16-core CPU and the 12-core GPU, the 16-core CPU and the 4-core GPU, and the 8-core CPU and the 4-core GPU. Versions of these chips with some CPU and GPU cores switched off fill out the rest of the Core Ultra Series 3 lineup.

We got to fool around with a Core Ultra Series 3 laptop for a bit, and naturally, we ran some benchmarks on it.

Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K is Team Blue's fastest desktop chip and currently sells for $519 on Amazon (discounted from $599). AMD’s competing Ryzen 9 9950X3D, positioned as a premium gaming and content creation processor, costs roughly $676 there.

Intel's new Core Ultra Series 3 'Panther Lake' CPUs feature an upgraded Arc B390 GPU: RTX 4050 perf, 82% faster than the AMD Radeon 890M.

The benchmarks are drawn from Geekbench 6.5 and UL's Procyon suite, run on Windows 11 laptops. Qualcomm claims the 10-core X2 Plus can deliver up to