Some enterprises might find that upgrading to newer, more expensive PCs is worth the investment since it appears cheap PCs won’t be coming anytime soon, analysts said.
Dell and HP both have announced new business PCs that run Intel’s long-awaited Panther Lake chip, also called the Core Ultra Series 3; it has been touted as Intel’s best chip in a long time.
Some of the rationales for corporate PC upgrades include the Intel chip’s AI features, fast performance, and long battery life, analysts said. (Intel-based laptops have not traditionally been known for their power efficiency.)
PC upgrade decisions will boil down to a generation-over-generation premium experience in terms of battery life and performance from devices with Panther Lake chips, said Next Curve principal analyst Leonard Lee.
“Devices powered by Panther Lake would be ideal for personas that require enhanced security and durable mobile use,” Lee said.
Dell executives called the company’s new PC lineup the most significant form-factor refresh in a decade. The new chips have helped reduce the size of motherboards allowing Dell to pack in higher-density batteries.
Some of the new models break the mold of regular PCs, Dell executives said.
One such model is the Dell Pro 5 Micro PC, a Copilot+ mini-desktop with the Panther Lake processor and AI accelerators. It provides flexibility in configurability in workspaces, such as attaching multiple monitors for business users, Zach Noskey, head of product for Dell Pro notebooks, said in a press briefing.
Other new Dell laptops with the same Intel chips include the Dell Pro 7 13 and 14 laptops, and Dell 14 Pro Premium. The PCs have Copilot+ AI features and can be remotely managed by IT administrators.
Prices were not immediately available.
Intel provided Panther Lake chip benchmarks assuming an upgrade cadence of every four years. Compared to a four-year-old PC, Panther Lake is 80% better in graphics, 34% faster in productivity performance, four times faster in GPU-based AI performance, and up to 40% better in single- and multi-threaded performance.
Intel measured battery performance at 27 hours for video streaming, 17 hours for Office productivity tasks, and up to nine hours when using Microsoft Teams, which is known to demand a lot of battery.
Despite the advances, some companies are hesitant to upgrade until prices stabilize, or they are cutting back on how many devices they upgrade, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates.
“AI PC is still the preferred upgrade path, since even if you don’t use all the capabilities today, in the three-to-four-year lifecycle of the machine, you surely will — and you’ll be at a disadvantage if you don’t have the AI capabilities,” Gold said.
IDC last month projected PC shipments would drop by 11.3% in 2026 because of higher PC and memory prices.
In separate press events, Intel and Dell argued there are other reasons to consider upgrading AI PCs despite the high prices. The new laptops and desktops, for instance, can run more on-device AI tools, a boon for IT leaders looking to cut cloud-based AI costs. Customers can run smaller language models (SLMs) on desktops with GPUs instead of relying on large language models (LLMs), Dell executives said.
The new laptops can run local AI agents that can communicate with models in the cloud, said David Feng, vice president of the client computing group at Intel. Feng was indirectly referencing OpenClaw, which is changing the way users think about on-device AI.
OpenClaw creates local agents to perform AI tasks that automate regular user work. It scans file systems, accesses local information, and communicates with LLMs in the cloud.
Intel has announced SuperBuilder, which allows local agents to collaborate with cloud-based LLMs using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Some Panther Lake vPro chips also have security features to protect against vulnerabilities resulting from AI or other threats.
The SuperBuilder delivers “greater security, stronger privacy, higher performance and a more efficient cost structure,” Feng said.
On-device AI and agentic applications are still nascent, though the Panther Lake with vPro chip features real-time threat detection capability called DTECT that runs on the NPU for a minimal performance hit, Next Curve’s Lee said.
The Panther Lake chips come in various configurations. They have up to 16 cores and up to 180 TOPS of AI performance through the NPU, GPU, and CPU.
Intel also announced Arc Pro B-series GPUs for graphics and AI, and Intel Xeon 600 chips for high-end workstations.