Dell shipped two XPS laptops on Intel's new Panther Lake chips - and one runs dramatically faster than the other.
A hands-on comparison surfaced meaningful gaps across graphics, AI workloads, and everyday computing between the two configurations. Both carry the XPS name and both run Panther Lake silicon, but the performance split was large enough to matter in real use. The results suggest an architecture that hits a high ceiling in its top configuration but delivers considerably less in the tier below - a gap that isn't obvious from the spec sheet.
Panther Lake is Intel's bid to stay competitive with AMD's Ryzen AI lineup and Apple's M-series in the premium thin-and-light segment, and a fragmented debut undercuts that story. The AI performance gap is especially notable, since Intel has positioned NPU capability as a headline feature of this generation. Buyers expecting consistent performance across a product family are right to expect better.
The XPS name has always carried a price premium, and shoppers who don't run down benchmark comparisons before buying may end up paying it for the slower machine.