Intel's latest "Panther Lake" designs are set to officially debut in the coming days, with the first reviews expected on January 26 . These 18A SoCs are anticipated to come with a significant price premium, as indicated by Samsung. The South Korean company reports that Intel "Panther Lake" based Galaxy Book6 Pro and Galaxy Book6 Ultra models will be approximately 20% more expensive than the previous-generation Galaxy Book5 models, which were based on the "Lunar Lake" SoC. This price increase is noteworthy because it is driven by a combination of new manufacturing technologies and the ongoing DRAM shortage. While Intel used TSMC N3B for "Lunar Lake," it has shifted much of the manufacturing to its internal Fab capacity with the introduction of "Panther Lake" on the 18A node.
On its South Korean official website, Samsung lists the Galaxy Book6 Pro series starting at 3,410,000 KRW (approximately $2,315) for a laptop featuring 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory, a 1 TB SSD, and an Intel Core Ultra X7 "Panther Lake" CPU with integrated Arc graphics. The specific model for the Core Ultra X7 is the Core Ultra X7 368H, which includes 16 cores, a boost clock of up to 5.0 GHz, and an Intel Arc B390 integrated GPU . Intel claims this 12-Xe core model is about 77% faster than the previous generation "Lunar Lake" Arc 140V integrated GPU and roughly 73% faster than the Radeon 890M found in AMD's "Strix Point." Additionally, Intel compares the Arc B390 to a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 laptop GPU, but adds that XeSS3 features like multi-frame generation yield an overall performance win.