22 hrs of battery life: Intel Panther Lake makes powerful Windows laptops efficient

Choosing a powerful Windows laptop, with one of Intel's bigger CPUs, as well as a dedicated Nvidia GPU, was a double edged sword in the past. One would get great performance out of such a performance-oriented laptop, but even when merely using office applications or surfing the web, battery life would suffer greatly. Older x86 CPUs were often powerful, but not at all efficient.

Thankfully, the technology has made great progress in the past few years, as both AMD and Intel CPUs have gotten more efficient. And Intel especially has made progress, first with the power efficient Lunar Lake CPU series and then with the 2026 CPU generation, codenamed "Panther Lake". Intel promised Panther Lake would bring the efficiency of Lunar Lake, but at a much higher performance level.

A claim that we can verify by now. Take for example one of our latest reviews of a Panther Lake based laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 9. This is an expensive premium mobile workstation laptop, made for rendering in CAD, video editing and virtualisation. Naturally, it features the most powerful Panther Lake variants, the H class of CPUs, as well as Nvidia RTX Pro graphics cards, Nvidia's line of ISV certified GPUs for workstations. 

Historically, these components would lead to a horrible battery endurance, even for devices with a big 90 Wh battery, such as the ThinkPad P1. Not so with the new ThinkPad P1 Gen 9: It delivers the workstation class performance, yet still managed to last more than 22 hrs in our Wi-Fi/web surfing test (150 cd/m² brightness). Going all the way back to the very first ThinkPad P1 that Lenovo made, back in 2018, this is the best battery life we ever measured for this laptop line, and it is not even close - more than double of the previous record.