Intel Panther Lake-H Benchmarks And Engineering Sample Sneak Peek

Benchmarks of an Intel Panther Lake-H engineering sample have leaked on X/Twitter, and the results have spurred some interesting debate. Before proceeding, though, it's important to clarify the nature of engineering sample hardware and how it usually does not reflect the performance of final hardware. This is especially apparent with the ES board being benchmarked and leaked here, which features relatively slow RAM versus what we've been told to expect from this launch. The slower RAM will not only impact some CPU scores, but massively impact iGPU performance, since they are heavily reliant on memory bandwidth and capacity to achieve the best performance.

First, @yuuki_ans listed an Intel Panther Lake-H platform with an unknown Intel Core Ultra 3 model CPU onboard. The CPU contains 2 Performance cores, 4 Efficiency cores, 4 Low Power Efficiency cores, and an Intel Xe3 GPU with 4 compute units. Prominent leaker @9550pro followed up this posting with a set of CPU-Z benchmarks, which we've shared below, showing a 531 score in the single-core test and a 3516 score in multi-core. In a reply from @yuuki_ans, the multi-core score is highly unstable, with a range from 3300 to 3800. The single-core score at 3 GHz suggests a performance improvement as high as 7% over Arrow Lake, but the early silicon and limited RAM speed somewhat muddy the waters.

It's also worth noting that CPU-Z is very basic benchmark that resides entirely in the CPU cache, and does not directly correlate to real world performance benefits with many workloads.

Intel Pantherlake-H ES Benchmark

2P+4E Full core turbo 3.0GHZ(P Core)
4Xe iGPU 1.5Ghz pic.twitter.com/pIm7vbUpC1

— GOK (@GOKForFree) November 22, 2025

Another result come courtesy of @GOKForFree, which shows a meager 965 score in 3DMark Time Spy. While this is engineering sample features only two Xe3 cores, versus the top-end 12-core configuration in a previous, more promising Panther Lake leak, it is still somewhat paltry by modern standards. For reference, an ancient Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 scores higher. But as always, take benchmarks from early engineering samples with a huge grain of salt -- there's a lot of optimization work that happens closer to launch. We'll have a lot more to talk about come CES 2026, and other benchmark leaks have generally shown more promise than these.