Panther Lake does not have great raw performance, because for now Intel has not succeeded to obtain in their new 18A CMOS process clock frequencies as high as they get in the older TSMC 3-nm process used for their previous Arrow Lake H CPU generation and the CPU cores of Panther Lake have only minor changes that can affect performance in comparison with Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake.

On the other hand, from the published reviews that I have seen, Panther Lake has significantly better performance per watt than Arrow Lake H, which can be attributed only to the Intel 18A process when compared with the TSMC 3 nm process.

The energy efficiency i.e. performance per watt ratio of CPUs is mainly determined by the fabrication process and not by the CPU design, as long as the CPU designers are competent enough (unlike the single-thread performance, which is determined mainly by the CPU design).

So there is no doubt that Apple CPUs made with the Intel 18A process will have better performance per watt than those made with a TSMC 3-nm process. Moreover, because Apple CPUs can reach a given level of performance at lower clock frequencies, they should be much less affected by the lower clock frequencies attainable with Intel 18A than the Intel CPUs.

We also do not know whether Apple intends to use the Intel 18A process (currently used for Panther Lake laptop CPUs and Clearwater Forest server CPUs), or only its successor, Intel 14A.