AMD is waving around competitive charts for its Ryzen AI MAX and Ryzen AI 400/300 notebook chips ahead of Intel’s Panther Lake launch next week.
Because Panther Lake is not on shelves, AMD says the comparisons are based on its internal expectations and what has been shown so far for Core Ultra Series 3.
AMD splits its Ryzen notebook stack into four segments, with “Premium” now led by the Ryzen AI MAX family. It has added two new SoCs, the Ryzen AI MAX+ 392 and the Ryzen AI MAX+ 388, and it points to devices such as Asus’s TUF A14 series.
In AMD’s premium matchup, Ryzen AI MAX goes against Panther Lake “X” SKUs with the top Arc graphics options, including Arc B390 or Arc B370. AMD says it expects wins in content creation, gaming, and AI, and it frames AI as a combination of CPU, NPU, and GPU.
AMD suggests it does not need a Strix Halo successor yet because the current parts can “tackle the competition” as they are, at least on its own numbers.
In the mainstream thin-and-light tier, AMD positions Ryzen AI 400 against Core Ultra 9 and Core Ultra 7 Panther Lake, while Ryzen AI 300 sits opposite the remaining Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 5 parts.
It argues that most Panther Lake chips in this bracket will ship with four Xe3, which it calls one-third of the full Xe3 iGPU configuration. AMD counters with Radeon 890M and 880M iGPUs at 16 and 12 compute units, respectively, plus higher clocks on newer parts, and says that keeps it competitive in content creation and gaming.
At the entry level, Chipzilla has Core Ultra Series 3 “Wildcat Lake” SKUs, which AMD describes as having two Xe3 cores and six CPU cores. AMD lines up Ryzen AI 300 and Ryzen 200 entry SKUs against that stack and claims wins across content creation, gaming, and AI.
AMD takes a swing at what Intel said during CES 2026, starting with graphics. Intel pitched the Core Ultra X9 388H and its 12 Xe3 graphics as being in “a league of its own”, while AMD answers that Ryzen AI MAX 395+ is 37 per cent faster on graphics than Intel presented.
The original report says it tested Core Ultra X9 388H at Intel’s booth and saw a large jump over Lunar Lake Xe2 iGPU, while still expecting Strix Halo to stay ahead for overall iGPU performance. It also says it will compare Panther Lake against Strix Halo in a review next week.
AMD targets Intel’s CPU messaging around “Huge performance scaling” and “Leadership Productivity,” and responds with a thread-count argument. It notes that Panther Lake tops out at 16 cores in a 4 P-core, 8 E-core, and 4 LP E-core layout with no hyperthreading, while Strix Halo has 16 Zen 5 cores and 32 threads.
On power, AMD calls out Intel’s “Leading x86 Power Efficiency” claim and says Intel’s own slides show little advantage versus Lunar Lake, with similar or sometimes higher SoC power. The same section notes that Intel still claims the Core Ultra X9 388H can achieve up to 78 per cent lower SoC power draw than the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 baseline, but that real testing will decide it.
AMD says Chipzilla made “NO” claims for most of the rest of the stack beyond flagship parts such as the X9 388H. AMD suggests that Ryzen AI 400 will lead in processing and graphics while maintaining its efficiency edge, which is a nice line for a slide deck.
