- A leak has surfaced for the rumored Intel Core Ultra X7 358H
- This Panther Lake CPU is shown with a strong Geekbench graphics score
- It’s better than a previous leak by 7%, which indicates Intel’s driver honing is coming along nicely with Panther Lake
Intel‘s incoming Panther Lake laptop CPUs are once again stirring up excitement as another leak paints a picture of fast-performing 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 which somebody 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 pretty nippy indeed. It’s also notably 7% faster than a previous Geekbench leak for this Core Ultra X7 358H processor.
Why the considerable improvement? That’s down to Intel’s honing and driver improvements for the GPU as it gets nearer to release. Panther Lake is expected to debut in laptops early in 2026, and what’s exciting 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 sporting four performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and four low-power efforts, for a total of 16-cores. (Although discounting the low-power cores, which are tiny, it’s a 12-core processor).
Analysis: Panther Lake promise
With the Xe3 integrated graphics pitching in at the 57,000 mark in OpenCL, this means the Panther Lake CPU outguns the RTX 3050 discrete laptop GPU by over 10% or so. In other words, we’re looking at something equal to the RTX 3050 Ti here, and if we get further performance improvements before the launch of Panther Lake, this Xe3 GPU may even edge out that standalone Nvidia GPU.
This once again illustrates the kind of leaps which are being made with graphics solutions that are baked into processors, allowing for very thin-and-light gaming laptops which can be more affordable. Remember, a standalone GPU takes up space in a laptop chassis, requires more effort around cooling, and pushes up the total cost of the device, too.
Not to mention that the Xe3 graphics here is using far less wattage than the likes of an Nvidia RTX 3050 typically does – which is 60W to 80W, whereas the whole chip only uses that with the Core Ultra X7 358H (depending on the laptop configuration in both cases, mind). This should translate into considerably better battery life with Intel’s Arc integrated solution, there’s no doubt about that.
Granted, Geekbench is not the first benchmark I’d turn to when evaluating the gaming prowess of any graphics card, but it does offer some indication of where the performance levels of the GPU lie. Indeed, we may see synthetic gaming benchmarks – or actual in-game tests – show that this Panther Lake chip has even more oomph to give than is suggested here.
This imminent range of mobile processors from Intel is looking a strong contender to seriously pep up budget gaming laptops in terms of both efficiency (battery) and performance. Indeed they’ll be even better news for handhelds, which are more restricted still in the claustrophobic confines of their compact form-factors.
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