Intel Panther Lake vs AMD Ryzen AI Max Plus: Who Actually Wins?

Intel's Panther Lake generation is the company's first consumer chip built on its own 18A process node, and the flagship part, the Core Ultra X9 388H, is now putting up numbers that actually challenge AMD's Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 head-on instead of just chasing it. That's a change worth paying attention to if you're shopping for a premium Windows laptop this year.

CPU: Intel takes the lead, and does it at lower power

On Geekbench 6, the Core Ultra X9 388H scores over 3,000 in single-core and roughly 17,687 in multi-core, according to benchmark testing compiled by NoobFeed. That's not just a generational bump, it's 15% to 21% faster than Intel's own previous flagship, the Core Ultra 9 285H. The more interesting number is the TDP it takes to get there: 45W, compared to the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395's 55W. Intel is winning on raw CPU throughput and doing it with a lower power ceiling, which is exactly the combination that matters most in a thin laptop chassis with limited cooling headroom.

Graphics: AMD still has the harder lead

CPU cores aren't the whole story on these chips, and this is where AMD pushes back. AMD's Radeon 8060S integrated graphics, paired with the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395, still holds a real lead over Intel's Arc-based iGPUs in this class, according to the same testing. Intel's mid-range Core Ultra X7 358H scores around 6,800 in 3DMark Time Spy at 65W, a 72% jump over the previous-gen Core Ultra 7 255H, which shows real progress, but it's progress against Intel's own last generation, not proof of parity with AMD. On Geekbench's Vulkan compute test, the Core Ultra 7 366H hit roughly 26,000, about 26% ahead of AMD's more modest Radeon 840M at 22,000, but that's a lower-tier AMD part, not the Radeon 8060S flagship pairing.

The honest read: Intel closed the graphics gap against its own prior generation dramatically, and beats AMD's lower-end integrated graphics, but AMD's top integrated-GPU pairing in the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 remains the one to beat if gaming or GPU compute on integrated graphics alone is the priority.

Price and where these chips actually land

This isn't a cheap-laptop fight either. AMD's Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 currently ships in machines like the Asus ROG Flow Z13 at $2,299.99, and early Panther Lake laptops are landing in a similar range, reportedly up to $2,400 for higher-end configurations. Both companies are clearly targeting the same premium buyer, not competing on budget positioning.

The verdict

If your workload is CPU-bound, code compilation, video encoding, general multitasking, the Core Ultra X9 388H is the better chip right now, and it gets there sipping less power, which should translate into better battery life in a laptop built around it. If integrated graphics performance is what you actually care about, gaming without a discrete GPU, GPU-accelerated creative work, AMD's Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 still has the edge and probably will until Intel's next Xe iGPU generation. Neither chip is a clean sweep, and anyone telling you otherwise is running one benchmark and calling it a verdict.