Intel Panther Lake: laptop powerhouse CPUs with up to 16-cores, Xe3 graphics and 170 TOPS?

Intel's Panther Lake is still a good way off - if the rumor-mongers are right, Arrow Lake might even be further off than we hoped - but that hasn't stopped the leak machine churning out speculation about Panther Lake CPUs.

Mind you, this latest Panther Lake leak, which comes from X (formerly Twitter) as flagged up by VideoCardz, should be treated with more skepticism than normal, as we're not familiar with the source - a certain Prakhar Verma.

So, fistfuls of salt in hand, the contention is that Panther Lake will be mobile chips only - with no desktop offerings. Theoretically we will get Panther Lake U series CPUs, efficient variants to follow Lunar Lake (which should debut late this year), and Panther Lake H chips to succeed Arrow Lake high-end mobile processors.

We're told that Panther Lake U series mobile CPUs will run with four performance cores and four low-power cores (these are the truly tiny cores, not to be confused with efficiency cores - which this chip apparently won't have any of).

However, the full H series Panther Lake chips will (obviously) be more heavily loaded, sporting four performance cores alongside eight efficiency cores, and four low-power cores backing that up - making 16-cores in total.

These mobile processors will also apparently run with Xe3 graphics (Celestial) and 4 Xe3 Cores, though the higher-end H series CPUs will push integrated graphics much further with 12 Xe3 Cores.

We should again underline that plenty of seasoning must be sprinkled over this, but VideoCardz does add some weight to the speculation here, observing that it matches up with other recent spillage around Panther Lake - so that's something.

Super-efficient AI accelerators

When can we expect Panther Lake to turn up in laptops? The estimation is for a 2025 arrival, and likely late in the year, given that Lunar Lake is only going to be out later in 2024. And given the fact that we haven't had much in the way of leaks around Panther Lake yet, too.

Panther Lake could be a major improvement on Lunar Lake, mind, with U series chips offering a 35% boost in efficiency over Lunar Lake - and remember, the latter is expected to be a seriously power-efficient mobile CPU already.

For graphics performance, those Xe3 Cores will make a big difference too, of course.

Not had your fill of spec rumors yet? Well, hold on to your neural processing hat, because Panther Lake will supposedly hit 170 TOPS for AI acceleration - though the NPU won't deliver most of that, but rather the powerful GPU (which is responsible for 120 TOPS, apparently, in its top-end incarnation).

So, if you thought that AI PCs with 45-50 TOPS were a big step forward - and they are - next year could witness a huge leap on from that. Second-gen AI PCs with Windows 12, anyone?

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