Core Ultra 9 386H is barely any faster than the Core Ultra 9 285H in first benchmark tests

The Core Ultra 9 386H is now shipping on higher-end laptops including the recently released Lenovo Pro 9 16IPH11. As part of the Panther Lake generation, it succeeds the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 9 285H that was prevalent on flagship laptops of yesteryear including the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 or MSI Prestige 16 AI. Unfortunately, users looking for gains in raw performance will find the new CPU rather disappointing.

As shown by our comparison charts below, the Core Ultra 9 386H performs within 5 percent of the older Core Ultra 9 285H when it comes to both single- and multi-threaded loads. In fact, when comparing their paper specifications, the Core Ultra 9 386H actually features smaller cache sizes but the same number of cores. For maximizing traditional CPU performance, the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 9 285HX or Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus would still be your best bet.

Instead of raw performance, the Core Ultra 9 386H excels in performance-per-watt as it targets lower base and Turbo power requirements than the Core Ultra 9 285H while offering similar overall performance levels. However, we've yet to test this reliably as our first laptop with the Core Ultra 9 386H is tied to a discrete Nvidia RTX GPU which inevitably skews power consumption measurements.

Beyond traditional CPU performance and power consumption, the Panther Lake processor also features a faster integrated NPU than its predecessor for smoother local AI performance. Assuming no discrete GPUs are involved, laptops sporting the Core Ultra 9 386H should therefore run noticeably more efficiently than one with the Core Ultra 9 285H even if raw processor performance is about the same. Otherwise, the Core Ultra 9 386H can feel like a rebrand in many ways depending on your use cases.