Intel Core Ultra 7 366H Panther Lake iGPU Crushes Radeon 840M On Geekbench
If you're chomping at the bit for Panther Lake performance leaks, well, put that filthy thing away for a moment and come take a look. A result for a Core Ultra 7 366H has popped up in the Geekbench database, and we've taken the time to compare it against contemporary and past integrated GPUs to see how it rates.
The test run for the Panther Lake part was performed using Geekbench's GPU test suite, running in Vulkan mode. That gives us no clues about the CPU performance of the system, but it does allow us to get a general idea of what kind of performance we can expect out of a Panther Lake Core Ultra 7—at least, if we account for the likely early nature of the driver software for the system, because it doesn't even give the GPU a name beyond "Intel(R) Graphics." That's a dead giveaway that the drivers aren't finalized.
Data from Geekbench browser; leaked result here.
The score isn't exactly world-beating. It comes in just ahead of a Radeon 840M, as we said, and well behind a Radeon 860M, to say nothing of Intel's own integrated Arc Graphics parts in mobile Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. Digging into the data, the benchmark doesn't list a clock rate for the integrated GPU, but suffice to say that we expect it to be pretty low versus what shipping silicon will hit. In other words, we expect the final performance to be considerably better than this. If this is the real speed of the Xe3 IGP, Panther Lake is cooked.
We're tentatively excited about the launch of Intel's Panther Lake processors. That's less because we're expecting them to be awesome—although we hope they are—and more because they represent actual advancement in the x86 hardware market. These will be the first chips with a new architecture of any kind since February of this year when AMD's Radeon RX 9000 GPUs launched, and if we look at CPUs, we have to go all the way back to October of 2024 when Intel's Arrow Lake came out.
Nobody else is launching fully new hardware at CES as far as we know. Barring a big surprise, AMD's got refreshed CPUs, Intel's got refreshed CPUs, and NVIDIA could potentially have "SUPER" GPUs... but probably not. So saying, Panther Lake is the biggest launch on the horizon, and it's arguably more exciting for what its release implies about the capability of Intel's 18A foundry than it is for what it can directly deliver as a product. Here's hoping Intel's new chip is a real roaring big cat and not a mewling micro-feline.
