What just happened? Acer has just revealed the first laptop powered by Intel's Panther Lake chips, the Swift 16 AI. In addition to featuring the upcoming APU, the device also boasts a 16-inch 3K OLED display and the "world's largest" haptic touchpad.
Acer unveiled the Swift 16 AI at the IFA conference that is taking place in Berlin. The headline feature is the next-gen Core Ultra 300 Panther Lake processor at its heart.
Intel demoed Panther Lake on the opening day of Computex 2025. Built on the company's 18A process node, Team Blue promised that the new chips would deliver performance comparable to Arrow Lake with efficiency similar to Lunar Lake.
The high-end Panther Lake models are rumored to feature up to 16 cores, likely using Cougar Cove (P-cores) and Darkmont (E-cores) architectures. The chips feature the Xe3 iGPU offering approximately 12 Xe³ cores – a 50% increase over the previous-gen Lunar Lake's eight Xe² cores. They also have a 5th-gen NPU that delivers around three times the performance of Arrow Lake's NPU.
Combined with the GPU enhancements, the overall AI compute power in Panther Lake is estimated at around 180 TOPS, which is probably why the laptop is yet another product to have "AI" in its name. Among the tools taking advantage of its local AI capabilities is Intel's AI Assistant Builder, which lets users build generative AI agents.
In addition to the next-gen mobile chip, the Swift 16 AI has a 3K OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. There's also 32 GB of LPDDR5x memory, a 1080p webcam with a privacy slider, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Dual USB-C – though they're both Thunderbolt 4 rather than Thunderbolt 5.
The laptop has a full-size keyboard with larger keycaps, a numpad, single-color backlighting, and what Acer says is the world's largest haptic touchpad, which only uses vibrations for feedback and has no moving parts. It's also thin and light, weighing less than 1kg (2.2 pounds).
No word yet on how much the Swift 16 AI will cost or when we can expect it to arrive. The first Panther Lake products are expected to launch near the end of 2025, and Acer's laptop will presumably be among them.
