Intel brings 18A process to budget laptops with new Core Series 3 CPUs

[Skye Jacobs]

First look: Intel is bringing its 18A process technology to value-oriented notebooks with the launch of Intel Core Series 3, a line of mobile processors built on the foundation of the Panther Lake-based Core Ultra Series 3. The processors are aimed at value buyers, commercial systems, and essential edge deployments.

Intel describes Core Series 3 as an upgrade path for small businesses and home users following a typical five-year refresh cycle, offering performance gains over five-year-old PCs and previous-generation low-power Core processors such as Core 7 150U.

Compared to a five-year-old PC, Intel cites up to 47% better single-thread performance, up to 41% better multi-thread performance, and up to 2.8× better GPU AI performance, based on the company's internal benchmarks.

Within its own stack, Intel says Core Series 3 can deliver up to 2.1× faster "creation and productivity" performance, up to 64% lower processor power consumption during a YouTube 4K streaming workload, and up to 2.7× higher AI GPU performance compared to the previous-generation Intel Core 7 150U, based on the company's reference measurements.

Intel describes Core Series 3 as its first hybrid, AI-ready Core Series processor, with platform AI performance rated at up to 40 TOPS. The company says this figure applies to platform-level AI workloads, including computer vision and speech AI, and positions the same silicon for both PCs and edge deployments.

Intel also lists support for up to two integrated Thunderbolt 4 ports, Intel Wi-Fi 7, and Intel Bluetooth 6, subject to OEM implementation and regional 6 GHz Wi-Fi regulations.

Intel also highlights "essential edge computing" as a major focus beyond laptops, including applications such as robotics, smart buildings, point-of-sale terminals, and smart metering. The company says the processors offer a balance of CPU performance, integrated AI acceleration, and power efficiency in these scenarios, including in comparisons with Nvidia's Jetson Orin Nano.

In internal tests, an Intel Core 7 350 configuration is said to deliver up to 1.5× higher object detection performance, up to 1.9× faster image classification, and up to 2.2× higher performance in video analytics compared to Nvidia's Jetson Orin Nano, using YOLOv5m, MobileNet-v2, and a 1080p30 video analytics pipeline in Intel's reference workloads.

Intel says more than 70 OEM designs are due to launch in the coming months. Early systems include Acer's Aspire Go 14, 15, and 16; several Asus Vivobook and ExpertBook models; HP's Omnibook 5 14; and MSI's Modern 14S and 16S, along with systems from Colorful, Haier, Tecno, and Wiko.

Lenovo, Dell Technologies, and Samsung are listed as "coming soon." Consumer and commercial systems powered by Intel Core Series 3 will be available from OEM partners starting April 16, 2026, with additional designs arriving throughout the year, while edge systems built on the new processors are scheduled to ship beginning in the second quarter of 2026.

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Intel brings 18A process to budget laptops with new Core Series 3 CPUs

 

[pnntmp]

Whenever I see "up to", I know the number that follows is either an exaggeration or an outright scam.

"up to 47% better single-thread performance" means absolutely nothing - the actual improvement, if any at all, may still be microscopic, and the CPU upgrade not worthy overall.
I don't care what's the max observed performance improvement in some specific case, but what's the average improvement over a wide variety of tasks.

 

[Kashim]

Whenever I see "up to", I know the number that follows is either an exaggeration or an outright scam.

"up to 47% better single-thread performance" means absolutely nothing - the actual improvement, if any at all, may still be microscopic, and the CPU upgrade not worthy overall.
I don't care what's the max observed performance improvement in some specific case, but what's the average improvement over a wide variety of tasks.

This is always the case with Intel CPUs. Their improvements are barely noticeable, but then Intel cherry picks games and apps where they can get 10-20% improvement instead of the 2-5% improvement we actually get when they update their CPUs. Intel has been doing this for a long time. In fact, they planned to do that forever with their stupid 12nm+++++++++++ nonsense where they were happy riding the miniscule improvements train. But then TSMC went and spoiled their fun and force them to actually put an effort in. Even now they're preparing a new CPU to take back the gaming crown from AMD, lol. It will be the exact same story. The new CPU will be barely faster than AMDs offering, most likely in the low single digits. But of course Intel will cherry pick games where they beat AMD by 10-20% and then brag about it to use it as a PR tool to try and convince everyone Intel is back.