Intel is banking its comeback on its new Core Ultra Series 3 processors, the first chips built using its 18A (roughly 1.8 nanometer) manufacturing process. The company claims a 60% performance improvement over the previous-generation Lunar Lake chips, with battery life in thin-and-light laptops extending beyond 20 hours under mixed workloads.
The 18A node is significant beyond the chips themselves. It represents Intel's long-awaited return to process leadership — or at least competitive parity — after years of falling behind TSMC and Samsung on advanced manufacturing. Intel Foundry is also positioning 18A as a product it will sell to external customers, and early interest from aerospace and defense clients has been reported.
In gaming benchmarks, the integrated GPU on Core Ultra Series 3 is reportedly capable of running titles like Battlefield 6 at over 140 frames per second at high settings — a remarkable figure for a laptop chip without discrete graphics. That positions these processors as legitimate gaming-capable ultraportables, blurring the line between thin productivity machines and gaming laptops.