I’ve reviewed lots of laptops powered by Intel CPUs over the last year, and I’ve had gripes. The Core Ultra Series 2 generation was a branding mess with its mix of Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake, and Meteor Lake architectures. But at CES 2026, Intel turned a corner. Intel Core Ultra Series 3—codenamed Panther Lake—looks like it’s actually a coherent platform to go toe-to-toe with AMD and Qualcomm. Intel seems to have its swagger back, too. Intel had TSMC manufacture its Lunar Lake CPUs last generation, but Intel is now back to manufacturing its own CPUs again. This year, Intel struck a huge deal with Nvidia and the US government became a large shareholder in its operations. Despite recent struggles, the big chipmaker shouldn’t be written off yet. I didn’t have the opportunity to benchmark any of these new Panther Lake-powered machines at CES, so stay tuned for that once we get our hands on review units. But I’m still impressed—and here’s why. Battery life and performance in one Intel’s Lunar Lake was a strange beast. Made by TSMC instead of Intel, it was Intel’s attempt to jump on board the power-efficient laptop revolution, complete with onboard memory that couldn’t be upgraded, a speedy NPU for running overhyped Copilot+ PC AI features, and a surprisingly capable integrated GPU. Mark Hachman / Foundry But Lunar Lake’s big limitation was multithreaded performance. It came far behind Arrow Lake and even Meteor Lake CPUs in our Cinebench and Handbrake benchmarks. That’s why most laptops I reviewed throughout the year eventually went with Arrow Lake or Meteor Lake chips. Yet, while those offered stronger performance, they sacrificed battery life and also ran hotter than Lunar Lake. With Panther Lake, Intel says we should expect more than 50 percent better multithreaded performance over Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, with 10 percent less power usage than Lunar Lake. Intel also claims that Panther Lake’s performance is similar to Arrow Lake. This time around, it sounds like we’re getting both battery life and solid multithreaded CPU performance in the same hardware package. (Want to dive deeper? Learn more about Panther Lake’s technical details.) New integrated GPUs look impressive Intel has been hard at work on upgrading its integrated graphics over the last few years, and it’s now marketing its new Arc B390 iGPU as being on par with Nvidia’s RTX 4000-series discrete graphics cards. We benchmarked the hardware at CES 2026… and it’s close! With Lunar Lake, Intel delivered seriously impressive integrated Arc graphics—but Lunar Lake wasn’t the place for serious iGPU upgrades. Lunar Lake was focused on battery life and not CPU performance, which meant Intel’s best-performing integrated graphics was paired with a CPU platform that struggled in multithreaded performance. Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake had even worse iGPUs. Benchmarking Intel’s Panther Lake with Cyberpunk 2077.Mark Hachman / Foundry By bringing Intel’s fastest iGPUs together with an even faster CPU, Panther Lake promises to power laptops with impressive gaming performance on integrated graphics. That’s something a few PC manufacturers were eager to tell me about at CES 2026. Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 hardware could power PC gaming experiences without a discrete GPU. Companies like HP were showing off demos of PC games running on Intel’s new iGPUs. Competing with AMD in handhelds With Panther Lake, Intel is talking about bringing more competition to the gaming handheld space. Steam Deck-style handheld gaming PCs largely use AMD processors, and there’s speculation that companies like Valve may release hardware with Arm chips in the future. Intel had so much swagger that one executive even talked smack at CES 2026, accusing AMD of “selling ancient silicon” for handhelds. Intel is promising custom Panther Lake hardware for the gaming handheld market—something that could be seriously impressive, considering how good Intel’s integrated graphics are getting. AMD disagreed (naturally), saying Panther Lake would come with a bunch of baggage and be a bad fit for handhelds. We’ll see who’s right after the hardware is released. I’m just excited to see more competition. NPUs that catch up to Windows 11’s minimum specs While lots of PC manufacturers are still eager to talk about Copilot+ PCs and AI laptops, Microsoft looks like it’s moving on from its NPU obsession. Companies like Dell are shifting away from AI laptops, too. The NPUs Intel has been shipping for the last few years have been far below Microsoft’s minimum specs. After Microsoft announced back in May 2024 that Copilot+ PCs would require an NPU with at least 40 TOPS of performance, Intel has mostly been shipping laptop hardware with 13 TOPS NPUs—far short of Microsoft’s minimum target. Only Lunar Lake and now Panther Lake cleared the floor for Copilot+ PC features. Meanwhile, all Qualcomm Snapdragon X hardware met the minimum, and AMD’s Ryzen AI CPUs delivered solid performance on a traditional x86 platform with the NPU specs Microsoft asked for. Matthew Smith / Foundry It’s been a big black eye for Intel that most Intel CPU-powered laptops still don’t meet Microsoft’s minimums for these hyped AI features, over 18 months after Microsoft’s announcement. The good news? Most PC buyers don’t care much about Copilot+ PC features, and Microsoft now appears to be deemphasizing them. But at least Intel has finally caught up to Microsoft’s minimum specs. Renewed focus on manufacturing process Intel’s choice to outsource Lunar Lake manufacturing to TSMC was a huge shift in its priorities. Up until then, the company had always manufactured its CPUs in its own foundries. Intel even threatened to abandon manufacturing going forward. Back in July 2025, Intel said it would give up on its next-generation 14A manufacturing process if it couldn’t find a customer, and some speculated that Intel could abandon its own chip fabrication processes. The US government took a stake in Intel a few weeks later, and I’ve always wondered if that dire announcement to shareholders was a negotiation move. Intel signaled that its US-based manufacturing business was struggling and soon after landed the federal government as a shareholder. Now, Intel’s CEO said at CES 2026 that it’s very excited about investing in its 14A process. It’s a huge shift from how the company was acting just last summer. Panther Lake is the first product built on Intel’s 18A manufacturing process, and Intel is no longer depending on TSMC. Intel is also abandoning some of the weirder decisions of Lunar Lake. For example, Panther Lake no longer has on-package memory. In a world where RAM is driving up the price of PCs, that’s valuable. Will Intel’s “Core Ultra Series 3” be watered down, too? While Intel is cleaning up its naming a bit, I’m a little concerned about one thing: does “Core Ultra Series 3” mean anything this time around? A year ago, “Core Ultra Series 2” meant “Lunar Lake”… until Intel released a bunch of Arrow Lake and Meteor Lake chips with Core Ultra Series 2 branding, muddying the brand. Now, at CES 2026, everyone seemed to be using “Core Ultra Series 3” as a stand-in for “Panther Lake.” But will Intel once again release older architectures with Core Ultra Series 3 branding in the coming year? Will we get another round of rebranded Meteor Lake chips? Or Lunar Lake chips? If so, “Core Ultra Series 3” might not mean anything. Either way, Intel’s hardware platform feels like it’s getting where it needs to be. The company is combining performance with battery life, delivering serious integrated graphics power, making its own CPUs, and no longer issuing dire warnings that it may abandon its future manufacturing processes. I look forward to reviewing Panther Lake-powered PCs because they sound impressive. More competition is always good for PC users. Read...

ThinkPads are great. They’re sturdy, no-nonsense designs with solid keyboards. They’re laptops for people who want laptops instead of glorified tablets. That might be why they’re expensive and rarely go on sale… but if you’re okay with a slightly outdated model, you can get a great ThinkPad T14 for just $335.99 on eBay/Newegg right now. View this ThinkPad deal The T-series is the workhorse of the ThinkPad line, and the 14-inch T14 is one of its best sellers. This version is a refurbished T14 G3, first released in late 2024. It’s packing a 12th-generation Core i5 processor, which is definitely on the lower end now since it relies on slower DDR4 RAM. But speaking of RAM, it has 16GB, which is the minimum I would recommend for Windows 11. The 256GB of storage is also a little anemic, but can be upgraded easily with another M.2 drive. On the plus side, the 1200p screen is touch-enabled, a rare coin for work laptops. It’s also loaded with ports: double USB-C/Thunderbolt 4, double USB-A, HDMI, and—glory be!—an Ethernet port. The webcam has a dedicated privacy shutter and the keyboard (complete with that iconic TrackPoint nub) is the best in the business. The integrated graphics aren’t great for gaming but should handle simple fare like Minecraft just fine. This is a refurbished laptop being sold by Newegg, with a one-year warranty (great!) from Allstate (less great). At a list price of $419.99 plus a 20 percent off FAVEFINDS20 coupon code from eBay, that brings the final price down to $335.99. For comparison, a new model of this laptop (albeit without the touchscreen but with more storage) is going for $800 on Amazon at the time of writing. I think this is a fantastic deal if you’re looking to get a laptop for standard browsing, video, and writing, without needing any extra dongles or docks. ThinkPads are also a lot tougher than most designs, as they’re meant to be taken on business trips constantly. (I once managed to revive a T-420 after my dog used it for, ahem, personal relief.) But get an order in quick if you’re in the market. Stock for refurbished models of a two-year-old design can’t be very high. Get this refurbished ThinkPad T14 with 16GB of RAM for $336Buy this ThinkPad laptop Read...

Do you need 16GB of memory in your graphics card or can you make do with just 8GB? If recent leaks and reports are accurate, you may not have a choice soon. Nvidia is reportedly emphasizing 8GB models over 16GB versions, and Asus may have just straight-up halted the production of the 16GB RTX 5070 Ti. A post on Chinese forum Board Channels, reported by VideoCardz, says that Nvidia is reducing shipments of the 16GB version of the RTX 5060 Ti and the RTX 5070 Ti. The former has been far better received than the 8GB version of the same card, and the 5070 Ti with 16GB of memory has likewise reviewed much better than the 12GB 5070. In the same vein, YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed reports that supplies for Nvidia cards with 16GB of memory and more are in short supply. “Asus, the largest Nvidia AIB partner, explicitly told us [the RTX 5070 Ti] is currently facing a supply shortage, and as such, they have placed the model into end-of-life status. This means Asus has no plans to produce 5070 Ti models from this point forward — what is currently on store shelves is it from them.” Bleak. We were finally starting to see graphics cards edge towards retail prices again. I was able to buy an RTX 5070 Ti at below retail during Black Friday less than three months ago. That same card is now almost $1,000, over $200 above retail. Both of these statements are unconfirmed, though I personally trust Hardware Unboxed not to spin the story. The first and most obvious culprit would be the ongoing RAM crunch, which affects consumer graphics cards as much as anything else. Nvidia is also a supplier of GPUs to the “AI” industry, and would naturally shift its most crucial output to business customers buying incredibly expensive chips. The company announced six new data center chips at CES. CES used to stand for “Consumer Electronics Show.” The company’s keynote made zero mention of consumer products, instead relegating new DLSS 4.5 and G-Sync Pulsar to a separate announcement. PC gamers were already feeling constrained by low-memory cards as far back as 2022, when Nvidia cancelled a 12GB variant of the RTX 4080. There have been similar concerns over whether the upcoming Steam Machine revival can compete with consoles with only an 8GB AMD card. General computers are facing the same crunch: Laptop makers may go back to 8GB of RAM for mid-range laptops, even as more and more users really need 32GB. It looks like anyone who has less than a four-figure budget for their next GPU might need to scale back their expectations of graphical power. Thanks, “AI!” Read...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says we shouldn’t think of LLM output as “slop.” You know, AI-generated content, the thing that’s making the internet worse in every measurable way, and causing consumer electronics prices to skyrocket? So it would be a real shame if you installed an extension in your browser that changed “Microsoft” to “Microslop” all over the web. Yes, installing “Microsoft to Microslop” would be a naughty and entirely cynical response. Especially if you, say, used Edge’s Chromium base to install it in Microsoft’s own default web browser, Edge. That would just be twisting the AI-generated knife, wouldn’t it? “Screw you Satya Nadella. Learn about Barbara Streisand,” writes the developer on the Chrome Web Store, who freely admits they are “managing my levels of spite.” I can relate. They add that the extension only visually manipulates the page, so it won’t break links, or collect or store any user data. Amazon/Microslop If Nadella and/or Microsoft are feeling particularly touchy about being called sloppy or any derivative thereof, they have only themselves to blame. Nadella himself claimed that 30 percent of the software company’s code is now AI-generated. That’s amidst a massive user pushback, as the don’t-call-it-a-forced-migration from Windows 10 to 11 has angered both regular consumers and businesses, the constant insertion of Copilot “AI” into every part of Microsoft’s business causes headaches and privacy concerns, and software subscription prices rise as Microsoft tries to force people to buy Copilot services. All the while…it seems that almost no one is actually using Copilot. Local “AI” applications using all the NPUs in new Windows laptops are still extremely limited, and Dell has figured out that even people who want to use “AI” will just open up a browser and go to ChatGPT. So yeah, it’s understandable why people are calling the company Microslop after its CEO blared out a tone-deaf declaration. I first heard it on the CES show floor, while I was trying to find a single new product that didn’t have “AI” features jammed into it for no discernible reason. Windows Latest spotted the browser extension, but here’s a fun bonus: a guide that will remove all Copilot features from Windows itself, among others. Read...

Open AI has launched ChatGPT Translate, a standalone translation tool designed to challenge Google Translate. The translations are done using AI, which means that you should expect them to be less accurate than if you hired a professional translator. If you wish, you can also change the style of the translation to suit a specific target audience, such as children, academics, or business people. Around 50 languages are supported at launch. In the long term, it will also be possible to upload images and audio files that need to be translated, reports Android Authority. Read...

The three biggest memory producers on the planet are Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. The latter just announced that it’s investing 19 trillion Korean won, approximately $13 billion USD, into a gigantic new memory fabrication facility. But if you’re hoping it’ll make RAM for PCs or graphics cards, keep on hoping: this facility is exclusively making High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for industrial hardware. According to SK Hynix’s press release (machine translated), this massive investment is supported by the local governments in the North Chungcheong Province. With a planned total area of approximately 231,000 square meters or 57 acres, the facility would be more than triple the size of a professional football stadium, and approximately eight times as expensive as the Burj Khalifa skyscraper. As “AI” data centers continue to be planned and constructed, putting strain on electricity and other resources, industrial demand for memory far outstrips current output. The result is a memory supply crunch that has sent prices skyrocketing across the entire electronics industry, from the biggest companies to the smallest customers. Micron has flat-out killed Crucial, its direct-to-consumer memory seller. And Samsung has struggled to fulfill orders to its own consumer electronics division, as the semiconductor business prioritizes more profitable orders from data center suppliers. Unfortunately, chip fabrication plants take years to get up and running. Even if the HBM memory supplied by this new mega complex could ease the production crunch and open up manufacturing capacity for consumer-grade RAM elsewhere, it’s likely that it won’t be built and getting chips out before 2030. Industry commenters say that one to two years of constrained memory supply is the absolute best-case scenario, with some estimates saying that the current situation may take six years or more to resolve. Read...

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When Dolby Labs announced Dolby Vision 2 in September 2025, I didn’t really get it. The original Dolby Vision was easy to understand: If your TV and streaming content supported it, you’d get a brighter picture with more color detail, particularly in shadows and highlights. I remember being blown away by the technology when it first debuted at CES 2014, especially compared to the 4K displays and curved panels that TV makers were hyping up at the time. The improvements Dolby Vision 2 promises aren’t as straightforward. While Dolby’s initial press release uses all kinds of jargon to describe the new format (with terms like “Content Intelligence” and “Authentic Motion”), the tangible benefits are tougher to parse. Fortunately, CES 2026 provided an opportunity to see Dolby Vision 2 up close, compare it with the original Dolby Vision, and get some questions answered. While Dolby Vision 2’s benefits are a bit murkier, they at least address some annoyances with streaming video today. Dolby Vision 2 deals with HDR’s darkness issues HDR (high dynamic range) is a feature in many modern TVs that allows for greater differences between the darkest and brightest parts of an image, with more color detail in between. With HDR, for example, a scene depicting an explosion will exude more vivid reds and oranges, instead of blown-out whites, while HDR in a shadowy scene will be rendered with evocative blue and green hues, instead of just depicting a muddy gray. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. But with every HDR format—the original Dolby Vision along with HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma)—a common complaint is that dark scenes can look too dark. Dolby’s solution is to gather more data about how the content was made—for instance, the creator’s choice of reference monitor, or how much ambient light was in the color-grading room—and adjust brightness on playback accordingly. The idea is to compensate for the difference between what creators see in their expensive editing suites and what viewers see on their TVs at home. Jared Newman / Foundry “We know exactly what shadows were meant to be seen, and not,” said Dolby’s director of business strategy, Jonas Klittmark. Dolby Vision 2 aims to make HDR look better on cheaper TVs While the original Dolby Vision typically required a mid-range or better TV, Dolby is optimizing this new version for cheaper sets through a new tone-mapping engine. This combines additional metadata from creators with local tone mapping, which makes more granular adjustments to the colors of each pixel. Local tone mapping is the process of analyzing the wide range of color of brightness in an HDR image, and then compressing that data into a form that the TV you’re watching can actually deliver. In a demo at CES, the result was a noticeable difference on what Dolby claimed was a $250 TV that didn’t have any local dimming zones. Next to a comparable set running the original Dolby Vision, the new version produced more vivid colors. Jared Newman / Foundry “The new engine is just much more capable of holding onto the goodness of the original HDR source, even on a display that’s quite limited in its capabilities, like this,” Klittmark said. That same tone-mapping engine also gives Dolby Vision 2 a neat new trick: It’ll let users control the intensity of the HDR effect through a slider in their TV settings. Users might want to increase the effect in a window-lit room with lots of reflections, for instance, or dial it back if the picture seems too eye-searingly bright. Dolby Vision 2 allows for smoother motion (without overdoing it) One of the most intriguing Dolby Vision 2 features has nothing to do with HDR at all. Instead, it’s a feature called “Authentic Motion,” which makes for a less jerky picture in scenes with fast motion (the industry refers to this visual jerkiness as “judder”). Unlike the much-maligned motion smoothing effects on most smart TVs, which can be so smooth that it looks like you’re watching a soap opera, Dolby’s feature applies just a small amount of frame interpolation in certain scenes, based on metadata delivered by content providers. In a CES demo, Dolby showed a movie scene in which the camera swept across the room without the usual judder, but in a way that still felt cinematic. “In Dolby Vision 2, we’re dynamically through metadata setting the de-judder just enough to take the edge off of the judder, so that it doesn’t bother you anymore,” Klittmark said. Dolby Vision 2 Max Alongside the standard Dolby Vision 2, there will also be a fancier version called Dolby Vision 2 Max. While both versions will have mostly the same features, Dolby Vision 2 Max will further adjust the picture based on a TV’s ambient light sensors; for example, it will help to avoid scenes that look overly dark. This is effectively an evolution of Dolby Vision IQ, an extension of Dolby Vision that is available in many of today’s mid-range to high-end TVs. More importantly, Dolby believes Max will serve as an overall indicator of TV quality, in the same way it believes Dolby Vision once did. When Dolby Vision first arrived in the mid-2010s, many TVs promised HDR compatibility, but weren’t bright or colorful enough to make HDR video look good. Dolby Vision support became a useful proxy for knowing if you’d get a decent HDR picture. Now that Dolby Vision 2 is heading to lower-end TVs, Dolby hopes the “Max” label will help delineate TVs with superior picture quality. “Dolby Vision 2 Max is for premium TVs, and it will basically replace Dolby Vision in the market,” Chris Turkstra, Dolby’s vice president of home devices, said. “Dolby Vision 2, which you can think of as a standard version of Dolby Vision, that will attach to new TVs that don’t have Dolby Vision today.” It’ll be a while before Dolby Vision 2 matters While it’s worth being aware of Dolby Vision 2 as more TV makers and streaming services get on board, it’s still early days for the format. So far, only three TV makers have committed to supporting Dolby Vision 2: Hisense will offer it in its top-shelf RGB MiniLED TVs for 2026, TCL will have it in its high-end X11L SQD Mini LEDs and mainstream C series sets, and Panasonic will bring it to several new OLED TVs. In other words, the promise of Dolby Vision 2 in low-end TVs isn’t materializing anytime soon. Meanwhile, three other major TV manufacturers–LG, Samsung, and Sony–have not announced their Dolby Vision 2 intentions. Samsung, for one, doesn’t support any version of Dolby Vision today–most likely because it doesn’t want to pay royalties to Dolby. On the content side, Peacock is the only streaming service on board with Dolby Vision 2, which it will support along with the original Dolby Vision for live sports. Given that content makers must also support Dolby Vision 2 in the editing process, it might be a while before more streamers decide to throw their weight behind it. Dolby Vision 2 probably won’t be a factor for anyone thinking of buying a new TV in 2026. But as the format becomes more common in the years to come, it’s something you’ll want to think about, especially if, like me, you finally understand it. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice. Read...

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