Intel CES 2026 Keynote Live Coverage

After a brief break following NVIDIA’s enterprise-focused keynote, we’re back for our second chipmaker keynote of the day: Intel. Unlike NVIDIA’s presentation, Intel’s presentation promises to be far more on-brand for CES, with a focus on consumer electronics via their Core Ultra Series 3 processors – better known as Panther Lake.

Intel CES 2026 Keynote Live Coverage Preview

Intel’s presentation is an official CES event, taking place at the Venetian hotel.

The company has been very upfront about what they’ll be talking about this year, with CES 2026 being the launch event for the Panther Lake-based Core Ultra Series 3 processors.

This presentation is scheduled to run for one hour.

Intel CES 2026 Keynote Coverage Live

And here we go! Here’s Lip Bu Tan.

Lip Bu-Tan is no stranger to speaking, though this is his first time hosting an Intel CES keynote.

Bu-Tan is delighted to announce that Intel hit its goal of shipping Intel 18A-fabbed chips in 2025. And in fact they are exceeding their goals.

Intel Core Series 3 will be the next evolution of the PC.

And now rolling a video about Series 3/Panther Lake.

“Progress never pauses. And neither do we”

Now on stage is Jim Johnson, Senior VP and GM of Intel’s Client Computing Group, to detail Series 3 to the crowd.

Delivering leadership products on a leadership process node.

18A is in high volume production. Panther Lake is ramping.

Jim is recapping 18A’s marquee features: RibbonFET (GAAFET) transistors, and PowerVia backside power delivery.

Intel is building for what’s next. And what’s next is AI.

“It’s a huge opportunity for all of us”

Fundamentals still matter. In this case being a power-efficient, highly-performant PC with all-day battery life.

Quickly recapping the technical features of Panther Lake, which were originally disclosed by Intel back in the Fall.

Core Ultra Series 3: Built for scale.

Series 3 combines what for the last generation was 2 different silicon designs. Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake have been combined into a single chip design.

The GPU tile has been moved to its own chiplet. Allowing Intel to swap out GPUs based on market needs.

Multiple configurations using a single package type up and down customers’ designs. And they can use their own power delivery schemes.

As for performance, Series 3 delivers 60% more performance than Lunar Lake.

And SOC power has been significantly reduced.

“This is the last time” Jim is going to talk about putting the myth of x86 power inefficiency to bed.

Now on to Arc graphics.

Intel has been continuing their ramp towards becoming a competitive GPU vendor.

70% faster gaming performance than Lunar Lake.

And Intel is claiming performance supremacy over AMD (at 45 Watts).

Intel is also preparing to launch the next generation of XeSS image upscaling and frame generation/interpolation: XeSS3.

Arc B390 will ship with multi-frame generation support, capable of generating 3 additional frames for 1 rendered frame.

EA will be integrating XeSS3 technology into future works.

Intel will also be launching an entire handheld gaming platform around Panther Lake. More details about that coming later this year.

Now pivoting over to AI.

AI is a partnership between hardware and software ecosystems.

Jim is talking about the potential for AI to transform software engineering.

Intel enables AI features via its CPU, GPU, and NPU blocks.

And of course, Intel has a particular interest in local model execution.

Developers can deploy models without custom tuning.

And they continue to work closely with Microsoft on Copilot+.

Intel has shipped almost 4 ZettaOPS of edge computing hardware.

Series 3 is the start of the hybrid AI area.

Intel is also launching a new AI SuperBuilder, a reference design platform for generative AI.

Joining Jim on stage is Perplexity, who is evangelizing the benefits of local computing.

Continuing down the subject of AI, Jim is pivoting to the subject of AI at the edge.

In the face of high demand, Intel is accelerating the launch of edge hardware based on 18A, so that edge device vendors have access to the latest hardware sooner.

“There is no need to offload AI to a discrete card”

Intel has worked on a reference board and edge kit for Intel’s AI robotics suite.

This will be the most broadly adopted AI platform that Intel has ever shipped.

Now recapping Core Ultra Series 3.

Core Ultra Series 3 is ramping now. Partners will begin taking orders for systems tomorrow (though it’s not clear when they will begin shipping).

And that’s a wrap for Intel’s CES 2026 keynote.