(Image credit: Future)

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.

How about 74 fps of Cyberpunk 2077 at 1200p High settings? (Image credit: Future)

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.

Certainly, AMD's "new" Ryzen AI 400 series won't threaten Panther Lake. Because the Ryzen AI 400 series is just the Ryzen AI 300 series with a very slapdash lick of paint. AMD won't have a genuinely new APU for at least a year, and maybe longer.

At the same time, Panther Lake also looks to be pretty power-efficient. There's even going to be a version aimed squarely at handheld gaming PCs, which is surely the most exciting application.