Tom's Hardware sat down with AMD's SVP and GM of Client Product Group, Rahul Tikoo, at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, to get AMD's response surrounding Intel's new speedy Panther Lake mobile CPUs. Tikoo revealed that AMD is not afraid of Intel's new chips, claiming its lineup of high-performance Ryzen AI Max (Strix Halo) APUs and mainstream Ryzen AI series chips fulfill the market's needs more effectively.
Tikoo said that Intel's Panther Lake competition isn't anything for AMD to worry about. "Strix Halo, or Ryzen AI Max will kill it. [...] It's not even a fair fight at that point, because it's discrete-level graphics." the exec remarked. He said that AMD is in the most optimal position possible in the market, and that the company is meeting market demands better by providing two distinctly different lines of chips that provide very specific performance requirements for the demands of power users/prosumers and mainstream consumers.
"...And then, our strategy, okay, Strix Halo [and] Ryzen AI Max competes against that (Panther Lake 12 Xe), and it's better than that in terms of graphics performance, all of that. And then, for the mainstream of the market, that don't value that much graphics [power], because honestly, most of the people that are using Notebooks, that are outside of the creator or gaming spaces are, you know, they don't need that graphics performance."
Tikoo clarified that he believes shoppers will make decisions based on their needs, rather than looking for a chip that can do a little bit of everything.
"...So, like, people make choices, right? When they go into this space, they're like, Okay, here's the applications I'm using... or here's the gaming I'm doing."
The AMD lead also didn't miss the chance to jab Intel a bit, noting how Intel did not add any Strix Halo APU models into its benchmark comparisons — limiting its benchmarking runs strictly to its lower-end Ryzen AI series chip and its own previous-generation chips.
"There's a reason why they didn't compare it right there. [...] they compared their highest-end to our midpoint." He also subtly exposed that Intel's pricing for Panther Lake won't be pretty: "And, oh, by the way, that 12 Xe [Panther Lake]... Wait until you see the price point on that. It's gonna be, you know. Enough said."
Panther Lake is Intel's latest and most powerful mobile CPU platform to date, built on its new 18A process node, with high-performance Cougar Cove P-cores, Darkmount E-cores, and Intel's highly potent Xe3 integrated graphics engine. The flagship Core Ultra X9 388H comes with 16 cores in total (four P-cores, eight E-cores, and four LP-cores), 18MB of L3 cache, Arc B390 iGPU with 12 Xe cores, and support for up to 96GB of LPDDR5x-9600 memory.
Intel's slides claim that the X9 388H packs 10% more performance for the same power as the previous-gen Arrow Lake-H Ultra 9 285H, and 60% more performance in the same metric as Intel's Lunar Lake Ultra 9 288V. Intel claims the Arc B390-equipped X9 388H is 77% faster on average than the Ultra 9 288V in gaming tests. Intel's new Xe3 iGPU flagship is so fast, in fact, that Intel claims the X9 388H gets roughly similar performance to an Nvidia RTX 4050 laptop GPU in most games at a 60W sustained power envelope, with the X9 388H operating at just 45W sustained.
If you want a better perspective, Intel's Xe3 B390 iGPU was able to pull off 80 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p high settings with XeSS set to Balanced mode in our hands-on testing.
