Intel’s next-generation Panther Lake laptop chips could be a return to form

Intel says systems with these chips should go on sale by the end of the year. In recent years, the company has released a small number of processors aimed at ultraportables late in the year and then unveiled a more complete lineup of mid- and high-end processors at CES in January—we expect Intel to stick with this basic approach.

Panther Lake is approaching



Panther Lake combines three functional chiplets using Intel Foveros packaging technology.

Intel



The three Panther Lake dies share the same package design, making it easier for PC manufacturers to interchange.

Intel

Intel first Core Ultra chipscodenamed Meteor Lake, were introduced two years ago. There were three big changes that set them apart from the 14th generation Core processors and their predecessors: they were built from multiple silicon tiles combined into one using Intel's Foveros packaging technologies; some of these tiles were made by TSMC, not Intel; and they added a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that can be used for on-device machine learning and generative AI applications.

The second-generation Core Ultra chips continued to perform all three functions, but Intel pursued a strange bifurcated strategy that gave different Core Ultra 200 series processors significantly different capabilities.

The most interesting models codenamed Moon Lake (also known as Core Ultra 200V) integrated system RAM into the CPU chassis, which improved performance and power consumption while making them more expensive to purchase and more difficult to manufacture. These chips included the latest Intel Arc GPU architecture, codenamed Battlemage, as well as an NPU designed to meet the performance requirements of Microsoft Copilot+ initiative for PC.

But Core Ultra 200V chips were mainly used in thin and light high-end laptops. Cheaper, higher-end laptops received a different type of Core Ultra 200 chip, codenamed Arrow Lake, which was a mix of old and new. The CPU cores used the same architecture as Lunar Lake, and there were usually more of them. But the GPU architecture was older and slower, and the NPU did not meet the requirements of Copilot+. While Lunar Lake was completely new, Arrow Lake was mostly an updated processor design combined with a tweaked version of the original Meteor Lake design (all those lakes have you confused yet? Welcome to my world).

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