It is finally here, going into ThinkPads, EliteBooks: Intel Panther Lake completes roll-out

So far, Intel Panther Lake aka Core Ultra 300 had a limited release - it has only been available in the consumer market since Intel launches Panther Lake at CES 2026. This meant that the commercial segment of business laptops, with big name brands such as Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell Pro and HP EliteBook, did not yet make the jump to the newest CPUs, and availability of Intel Core Ultra 300 was thus limited to a small part of the market.

This is now over: Intel has officially unwrapped the "vPro" variants of the Intel Core Ultra 300 CPUs, which marks the final push into the market for these CPUs. vPro is a suite of manageability and security features for big corporate customers that is enabled on certain processor variants, like the Intel Core Ultra 7 365, while the otherwise nearly identical Intel Core Ultra 7 355 does not have vPro and is thus considered a "consumer chip".

With the vPro variants on the market, we will soon reach the full saturation for Intel Panther Lake, as more and laptops with it finally become available. That includes popular models, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14, succesor of the X1 Carbon G13, as well as the just announced Dell Pro 5 laptops.

This also means that all eyes are now going to be on Intel's next CPU release, Nova Lake, which is slated to arrive in the laptop market in 2027. The only market segment that Intel has not covered yet is the budget, with more details about the Wildcat Lake chips supposedly following in the coming months. These CPUs may arrive just at the right time, as Apple is showing that the budget market can still grab headlines with its affordable MacBook Neo.