Phoronix has reported early performance regressions for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" processors when tested with development builds of Linux 7.0. Benchmarking was conducted ahead of the upcoming 7.0-rc1 release, which is due out on Sunday. Despite expectations of gains from ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and general kernel optimizations, the initial results indicate a negative trend. Phoronix stated that "at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong direction with the early Linux 7.0 benchmarking." This suggests that the early Linux 7.0 kernel iterations may not be immediately optimal for the new Intel hardware.