Intel Core Ultra 9 386H hits Geekbench with modest gains

Geekbench now lists results for Intel’s Core Ultra 9 386H, one of the central chips in the Panther Lake-H family slated for next year. The processor carries 16 cores: four performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and four low-power cores; in the benchmark, the latter two types are grouped as a single 12-core cluster.

Naming matters here: Ultra 9 and Ultra X9 are different products. The X9 version equips 12 Xe3 graphics cores, while the Ultra 9 386H includes just four, as it targets gaming laptops that rely on a discrete GPU. That helps explain why the leak is tied to Acer’s Predator line, even though the specific GPU in the tested unit remains unknown.

According to the leak, the processor runs at a 2.1 GHz base for the E/LP cores and boosts up to 4.724 GHz. Earlier expectations pointed to a 4.9 GHz peak, so this either reflects an engineering sample or suggests that final clock speeds have yet to be disclosed.

In performance, the Ultra 9 386H shows a modest step up over Arrow Lake-H—about 9% faster in single-threaded workloads and 4% in multi-threaded versus the Ultra 9 285H. The Ultra 9 285HX, built on a 24-core desktop die, still sits comfortably ahead, especially in multi-thread. For now, the numbers hint at incremental gains rather than a leap, which fits the chip’s positioning.