Just a week or so after Intel’s new flagship Panther Lake chip leaked on Geekbench and had its benchmarks shared for all to see, it appears we’ll be able to get our hands on one as soon as early January.
While we expected a 2026 release for the new chips, Asus may have jumped the gun by kicking off an event with the subtitle “Ubiquitous AI. Incredible Possibilities.” On January 6, just hours after Intel’s event is expected to reveal the chips themselves as part of CES 2026.
Panther Lake, here we come
The future unfolds. Join ASUS at #CES2026 on January 6, 9.00 a.m. (PST). Save the date and tune in to the ASUS CES 2026 Livestream! 👉 https://t.co/xJbeu2uDdC pic.twitter.com/WBVhmc6Xl7December 1, 2025
As Asus explains via its CES site, it “will showcase our latest solutions, including a full lineup of advanced AI PC products and other innovations — all designed to empower everyone, everywhere.”
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“See how our vision, “Ubiquitous AI. Incredible Possibilities,” drives AI transformation for the workspace, creators, and everyday life!”
As for how the new Core Ultra 9 386H chip will perform, there’s a 2.1 GHz base clock speed, while boosted clock speeds reach 4.724 GHz — lower than the anticipated 4.9Ghz.
It already beats Arrow Lake chips, with 9% faster single-thread speeds and 4% faster multi-thread speeds.
It’s also curious to see Asus touting AI-based laptops while the Core Ultra 9 386H is more of a gaming CPU that won’t pair with integrated graphics. Is Asus about to push further in that direction?
Whatever the answer, we really don’t have long to find out — we’ll be all over the coverage of Intel’s event on January 5, and the Asus one the next day.
A new challenger approaches
(Image credit: Future / Tom’s Guide)
Of course, CES isn’t an all-Intel affair, because Snapdragon’s X2 Elite chips are a-coming, too.
Our own Jason England benchmarked Qualcomm’s latest and said the latest revision should have Intel, Apple and AMD sweating.
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They’re expected to be a big focus at CES this year, suggesting we could be weeks away from a processor war the likes of which we’ve not seen in a while.
As for the numbers, the Oryon CPU prime core of the Snapdragon chip offers up to 39% speed increases on single core and 50% faster in multi-core than the last generation, while there’s 69% more memory bandwidth since RAM is on the chip itself.
Finally, its AI credentials are the new Hexagon AI engine, which is 78% faster in AI tasks, while the GPU is 2.3 times faster, too. There’s a whole new era of laptops coming, and it won’t be long until we see if they make the cut for the best laptops around.
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