The slim Asus Zenbook S14 shows the big issue of Intel's Panther Lake processors

The Asus Zenbook S14 from 2024 was a very good slim 14-inch laptop powered by Intel's Lunar Lake processors. They were designed for efficiency and had a maximum TDP of 37 Watts. This mainly affected the multi-core performance, which was still sufficient for everyday tasks, but the rivals offered more raw performance. However, Lunar Lake offered good single-core performance (also better than Zen 5) and the Arc Graphics 140V was a very fast integrated GPU.

Intel launched their Panther Lake mobile processors as a successor to both the Lunar Lake as well as Arrow Lake generation. The multi-core performance was improved significantly, but at the cost of higher power limit. The new high-end iGPUs Arc B390 and Arc B370 (12 and 10 Xe cores) are obviously highlights as well and offer a new level of graphics performance. The problem is that these fast iGPU models are only available on a few Panther Lake processors including the Core Ultra X models (like the Core Ultra X7 368H), but there seems to be problems with the availability or the pricing, because there aren't many models with these high-end chips so far (or they are really expensive).

All the other Panther Lake mobile processors are equipped with much slower integrated graphics adapters, which only feature four or two Xe cores. This is also the case for the new Asus Zenbook S14, which is equipped with the Intel Core Ultra 9 386H with the Intel Graphics iGPU (four Xe cores). Yes, the multi-core performance is better (even though you have to deal with louder fans) and you get longer battery runtimes, but the graphics and the gaming performance is actually worse compared to the two-year old Zenbook S14 2024. This is certainly a disappointment for expensive premium laptops like the Zenbook S14, where we obviously expected Core Ultra X CPUs. For more details on the new 2026 Asus Zenbook S14 please see our comprehensive review.