Intel Had The Most Exciting Product Launch At Ces 2026 And I

Intel's Panther Lake had zero competition, but it's still genuinely exciting.

Go back a year to 18 months, and there's absolutely no way you'd have picked Intel as the top candidate for the most exciting product launch at CES from the big tech players. But here we are, CES in January 2026, and Intel's new Panther Lake chip isn't just the most exciting launch. It's virtually the only launch.

Nvidia is obviously utterly consumed by all things AI, plus maybe a touch of memory crisis management. So, there were no new GPUs from Team Green. And AMD had nothing but respins of existing products.

I suppose you could point to Qualcomm's second-gen Snapdragon X2 chips as something exciting. But the whole Arm-on-PC thing still has so much to prove, the jury isn't just out, it hasn't even been vetted yet.

Which leaves Intel and Panther Lake. Being pretty much the only genuinely new PC chip at CES means you could get the impression it wins the excitement prize simply by default. It comes first in a race of one, in other words.

Strictly, that's true. But Panther Lake is also genuinely exciting for several reasons. For PC gaming, it's the new Arc B390 iGPU that's most compelling. Intel is claiming up to 70% more performance than its previous-gen Lunar Lake iGPU. And Lunar Lake was really pretty decent.

Our Andy took Panther Lake for a quick spin in Las Vegas and came away impressed. How about Cyberpunk 2077 at 1200p, High settings, no upscaling and 53 fps average? OK, that's without ray tracing. But still impressive, eh?

Add in Quality upscaling, and you're looking at a very playable 74 fps. At slightly beyond 1080p. On a bleedin' Intel iGPU. You can read Andy's piece for some more games briefly tested. But this is a distinctly gameable iGPU.

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In fact, it's very, very likely by far the quickest real-world gaming iGPU for the PC. And by that I mean excluding the likes of AMD's Strix Halo, which is super expensive and really built for tasks like running AI models, not games.

Source: PC Gamer