Intel announced its upcoming Panther Lake processors this summer, though a physical unveiling of the chip did not occur until now. At the Lenovo Tech World event, Intel’s CEO announced a demonstration of its upcoming Panther Lake product leveraging the firm’s 18A (1.8nm-class) process technology and packaging methodologies.
The Upcoming Panther Lake from Intel
Presently, Intel’s Core Ultra ‘Panther Lake’ was showcased as a non-working sample. Because this is a third-party event, Intel could not bring its own laptop on stage and therefore only showed off the chip itself, instead of any system running it. Nevertheless, Lenovo probably will have started building systems on Panther Lake CPUs. The processors expected to come with the next-generation Panther Lake will be based on the company’s 18A process node. Other recantations suggest that the configuration numbers will range in count from 8 to 16 cores, depending on the model.
The leaks indicate four main variants, including the high-end Panther Lake-HX version featuring 16 cores (comprising four high-performance cores, eight energy-efficient cores, and four ultra-low-power cores) with a power limit of 45W. There’s also another 16-core version in either base or maxed-out configuration which gains access to an enhanced Xe iGPU supposedly based on Celestial architecture that’ll hit all new registered memory speeds starting from DDR5-2400 LPDDR5x through Jetsonian HBM3-7400GHz respectively.
Then, finally, a Panther Lake-U variant again for ultraportable laptops is said to include four power cores and four efficiency cores — making it an eight-core solution rated at 15W. Specifically, this version of the chip lacks efficiency cores.
While details on desktop models remain unclear, the Panther Lake-U/H variants for mobile devices are expected to utilize a multi-die architecture with three active dies for compute, graphics, and platform connectivity, plus two passive dies for enhanced structural stability. Panther Lake assembly is anticipated to occur in the U.S.
In contrast to the Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake series, Panther Lake CPUs will be produced in-house by Intel, which should help reduce costs and increase profitability for the company, which has been facing significant financial losses. Furthermore, the new process technology—featuring gate-all-around transistors and backside power delivery—could provide significant performance improvements over previous generations.
