Intel Panther Lake Almost Matches Apple’s M5 Chip In An Elaborate Battery Test

Intel Panther Lake Almost Matches Apple’s M5 Chip In An Elaborate Battery Test

https://wccftech.com/intel-panther-lake-almost-matches-apples-m5-chip-in-an-elaborate-battery-test/

Publish Date: 2026-02-16 09:23:00

Source Domain: wccftech.com

In a development that seemingly bodes well for the efficiency and stability of Intel’s revamped chip fabrication process, the new Panther Lake SoC has managed to just about match Apple’s M5 processor – housed within the MacBook Pro – in an elaborate battery test.

Intel Panther Lake within the new Asus 14-inch ExpertBook Ultra pitted against Apple’s M5 chip housed within the 14-inch MacBook Pro

At the outset, we should concede that this test pitted Intel’s latest best chip for mobile phones and high-efficiency laptops, the 18A-based Panther Lake, against Apple’s lowest-end new processor, the M5.

Even so, given Apple’s heavily optimized ecosystem, any incremental gains by Intel do count, albeit with varying degrees of importance. Of course, the fact that this test used the new Asus 14-inch ExpertBook Ultra, which is one of the most compelling Windows laptops to launch recently, would have played some role in evening out Apple’s optimizations-related upper hand.

Before jumping on to the battery test, here is how the two devices stack against each other in some critical benchmarks:

1. The Asus 14-inch ExpertBook Ultra has a 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD vs. a 16GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD on the M5 MacBook Pro.
2. The Asus laptop boasts of SSD read speeds of 13,980MB/s vs. 6,797MB/s for the M5 MacBook Pro, as per the Blackmagic speed test.
3. The Asus ExpertBook Ultra has a Geekbench 6 CPU single-core score of 2,823 and a multi-core one of 15,449.
4. The Apple M5 MacBook Pro has a Geekbench 6 CPU single-core score of 4,328 and a multi-core one of 17,987.
5. The Intel Arc B390 GPU within the Asus ExpertBook Ultra has an OpenCL score of 50,072.
6. The GPU within the M5 MacBook Pro has an OpenCL score of 76,601.

Now, as far as the critical battery test is concerned, after 2.5 hours of continuous heavy testing on max screen brightness, the M5 MacBook Pro was left with a…

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