Panther Lake’s single-core and multi-core CPU performance outperforms all of its direct competitors, including AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, the past few generations of Intel mobile processors, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (though the recently announced X2 Elite could change that).

Single-core performance is about 10% faster than Core Ultra 200V, Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and Snapdragon chips. The only chips that make Intel look bad here are from Apple. Both the M4 and M5 boast fairly high single-core performance.

The Core Ultra X9 388H’s multi-core performance is also very good, but this is where the laptop’s cooling system and power levels make the biggest difference. In Asus’ performance mode, Panther Lake is about twice as fast as the Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 7 258V and 80-90% faster than older 12th and 13th generation Core processors and the Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 7 155H, depending on the test. Compared to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, Panther Lake is 10-40% faster, but again, it really depends on your testing.

But Handbrake video encoding tests also show that the processor draws just over 50W of power, which is typically 20-25W more than all other chips.

In low-power “Whisper” mode, the processor draws an average of nearly 25W during the Handbrake test, which is on par with other chips. It transcoded videos faster than any other processor except the Ryzen AI Max+ chip, which has desktop-level power limitations.

Panther Lake’s performance at this approximately 30W TDP level is still impressive. You get about 95 percent of the performance of a single-core CPU, 75 to 85 percent of the performance of a multi-core CPU, and the processor consumes about half the power under heavy load. The Ryzen AI HX 370 comes pretty close to Intel’s performance in this mode, but Panther Lake still beats it most of the time.