I never thought I'd think on laptops with envy. But here I am, writing these words.

It comes on the heels of Intel's deep reveal of Panther Lake, which is what Adam, Will, and Mark were learning about last week. (Such is the super sekret life of tech journalists.)

Mark's quick rundown of the facts is extensive, as overviews go—there's just that many details to cover. I highly recommend reading his deep dive as well, but among the highlights: Three chip families represented by one 8-core and two 16-core processors, with a claim of 50 percent better multithreaded performance over previous generations. The top-tier 16-core CPUs pack juggernaut-level integrated graphics, including dedicated support for ray-tracing. Said integrated graphics take the form of Xe3 GPU cores touted as 50 percent faster on average compared to last gen. Multiframe generation support (yep, "fake frames"). 

Intel is also cramming in upgrades to the "image processing unit" in its integrated laptop processors to boost clarity and color fidelity of video during we