Panther Lake is the new generation of mobile processors announced by Intel at CES this year. Its flagship model, the Core Ultra X9 388H, boasts remarkable scores on PassMark. The previous generation of CPUs is beaten by almost 10% in multithreading. However, we should take this score with a pinch of salt, as PassMark is not necessarily indicative of performance in games, for example.
Core Ultra X9 388H: solid results?
Broadly speaking, the Ultra X9 388H is the highest-end CPU in the Panther Lake range. It is a model with a total of 16 cores, with frequencies reaching 5.1 GHz in turbo mode. In terms of cache, we find 18 MB of L3 and 24 MB of L2, according to PassMark’s findings.
But what interests us here are the results obtained by the processor. In single thread, it scores around 4,451 points, compared to 37,904 points in multithread. Compared to the previous generation Core Ultra 9 285H, it scores similarly in single-threaded tasks, but has a comfortable lead in multi-threaded tasks of nearly 10%. Compared to a Core Ultra 9 185H, Panther Lake dominates by a massive 20% insingle-threaded tasks and 29% in multi-threaded tasks.
In contrast, this new CPU also outperforms a Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 470. AMD’s CPU scores 4,216 points in single-thread and 36,591 points in multi-thread, which is 5.8% and 3.5% slower, respectively.
However, it should be noted that there was a large disparity in the scores, as in a second run, the Panther LakeCPU achieved a multithread score of 40,523 points. It therefore remains to be determined what factor is responsible for this significant variation. Is it an environmental factor, such as a significant difference in ambient temperature? Or is it a different software environment? That is the question.
