Intel Core Ultra 9 386H 'Panther Lake' CPU loses to AMD's flagship Strix Halo APU in Geekbench

Update: AMD reached out to us to inform us that this article had some incorrect information, with AMD telling me that Wccftech's story included "two sets of data" that were "mixed up". We've got some updated graphs that better compare AMD's "Strix Halo" APUs against Intel's new Core Ultra 386H "Panther Lake" CPU, with this article updated with that new information.

Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 9 386H "Panther Lake" CPU has been benched early, still unable to beat AMD's flagship Strix Halo APU in Geekbench 6, but great single-core and multi-core performance against its other processor rivals.

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Intel will officially unveil its new Core Ultra 300 series "Panther Lake" CPUs at CES 2026 in January, with plenty of leaks and information in the wild and in the links below. So far, we've been seeing engineering sample (ES) processors which don't usually run at retail CPU clock speeds, but now it looks like we've got some benchmarks from proper, closer to retail silicon.

The new Core Ultra 9 386H processor has been spotted running inside of an unreleased Acer Predator Helios "PHN16S-151" laptop, with 64GB of RAM inside (no mention of if its normal DDR5 or LPDDR5X memory) but based on prior Predator Helios laptops, we should expect SO-DIMM memory inside.

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Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 9 386H processor will feature 16 cores in total (4 P-Core, 8 E-Core, and 4 LP-E cores) with a base frequency of 2.10GHz, and boost CPU clocks of up to 4.9GHz. The CPU was running at between 4.6GHz and 4.7GHz in the Geekbench 6 runs, joined by 18MB of L3 cache + 8MB of L2 cache, and just 4 Xe3 GPU cores (12 Xe3 GPU cores on higher-end Panther Lake SKUs).

• Read more: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 'Panther Lake' CPU clocks: flagship SKU tops out @ 5.1GHz
• Read more: Intel Core Ultra 5 338H 'Panther Lake' CPU: Arc B370 GPU = Radeon 880M perf
• Read more: Intel CEO on Panther Lake in Q1 2026: first step with new CPUs on Intel 18A node

In the Geekbench 6 run, the Core Ultra 9 386H processor hit 2845 points in the single-core run, and 15,407 points in the multi-core run, meaning the 386H loses to both the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" APU, and the Ryzen AI Max 390 "Strix Halo" APU which both feature 16C/32T of Zen 5 processing power. The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 scores a little less than the 386H from Intel in its single-core run of Geekbench 6 with 2786 points, but comes out on top with multi-core results of 17,636 thanks to its higher core/thread count.

Intel's new Core Ultra 9 386H processor also beats out the Core i5-14600KF, Core i9-14900HX, Core Ultra 9 285H, Ryzen AI Max+ 370 "Strix Point" APU, and the Core Ultra 7 268V "Lunar Lake" processors. We'll be on the ground at CES 2026 in Las Vegas next year, and can't wait to bring you everything you need to know about Intel's next-generation Panther Lake CPUs.

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Intel Panther Lake "Core Ultra Series 3" CPU features:

• Lunar Lake-level power efficiency and Arrow Lake-class performance.
• Up to 16 new performance-cores (P-cores) and efficient-cores (E-cores) delivering more than 50% faster CPU performance vs. the previous generation.
• New Intel Arc GPU with up to 12 Xe cores delivering more than 50% faster graphics performance vs. the previous generation.
• Balanced XPU design for next-level AI acceleration with up to 180 Platform TOPS (trillions of operations per second).