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Intel’s new Lunar Lake mobile CPUs officially launched this week, but they’re only for thin-and-light laptops and folks who want an “AI PC.” Their successor is Panther Lake, which will be built on the Intel 18A process and will include chips for Intel’s entire range of mobile products. Panther Lake won’t arrive until a year from now, but we now have our first account of what some of those versions might offer.
The Twitter account Jaykihn has been sharing a lot of news lately about upcoming CPUs, and the latest missive includes five SKUs expected for Panther Lake. Three are seemingly confirmed, while the other two are pre-EDS, meaning they haven’t been sent to Intel’s partners yet. As Tom’s Hardware notes, EDS stands for External Design Specification, which are specs Intel sends to its partners so they can build a laptop around a future processor.
The most interesting SKU listed for Panther Lake-H reportedly offers a 6+8+4 design for 18 total cores and 12 Xe3 cores for integrated graphics. The Xe3 cores are Intel’s third-generation graphics architecture, Celestial. Despite its high core count, it’s listed as a 28W part, indicating it could be a serious competitor in the handheld gaming arena with the Ryzen Z1 Extreme.
Intel will also offer a second 6+8+4 CPU with only four Xe3 cores and a 45W TDP, indicating it’s a high-end CPU for gaming laptops with discrete graphics. Beyond the two flagship SKUs, there will also be three lower-power configurations at 25W.
These five versions of Panther Lake constitute the “mainstream” version of Intel’s mobile CPU lineup, so they are for Panther Lake-H. Compared with their most direct predecessor, Meteor Lake, Intel is bumping up the total core count on the high-end chips from 16 to 18 and increasing the GPU core count from eight to 12 as well. A huge node shrink is also involved here.
Since Panther Lake will be built on Intel’s 18A process, it’ll be the first mobile processor made by Intel with gate-all-around transistors (RibbonFET) and backside power delivery. Intel tapped TSMC for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake but will return to using its own foundry in 2025 for Intel 18A CPUs, which includes Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest.