Next-Gen Intel Panther Lake Mobile Chips Target Faster Graphics on Lower Power, Better Battery Life

When we look at the annual stream of laptop announcements at CES in January, chances are Intel's Panther Lake processors will be inside many of them. These will likely appear in top-end thin and light models, which tend to have the latest integrated graphics and better NPU performance.

Panther Lake debut Intel 18A Consumer chips use the stunning 2nm process, and moving to a smaller process typically results in increased performance and new, denser chip designs. Essentially, we should see an increase in power and energy efficiency. For comparison: Apple M4 and future Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite are manufactured using a 3nm process technology, while AMD Zen 5 is manufactured using a 4nm process technology.

Process 18A also introduces a new transistor architecture called RibbonFET, which lays the foundation for future generations of chips.

I find it interesting that Panther Lake increased the performance of its AI not with a neural processor, which all CPU manufacturers tout as the most efficient way to implement it, but with a GPU. (GPUs always provide better performance for complex AI calculations, they just use a lot of power to do so.) The new Intel NPU 5 only increases performance from a maximum of 48. trillion operations per second up to 50 TOPS. That's much less than Qualcomm's, which tops out at 80. It adds support for FP8, a data type that has become commonplace due to its low overhead but better performance than its integer predecessor.

Instead, the new Xe 3 graphics architecture in Panther Lake (for third-generation Arc graphics) adds more optimized cores (up to 6 per render slice, up from 4 in Xe 2), resulting in a performance increase from 67 TOPS in Xe 2 to 120 TOPS with Xe 3. Intel claims the new Arc graphics work in games much faster than Lunar Lake's Xe 2-based Arc generation for a given power consumption. Play longer and faster: Holy Grail.

Another notable update concerns the image processing used by webcams. Added support for Intel “stepped” HDR acceleration, a retronym to the original method of expanding a photograph's tonal range by algorithmically combining bright and dark exposures. Noise handling has also been improved. Overall, this means that photos and videos should have better quality in low light.

There will be multiple configuration options for the Panther Lake chips, with up to 8- or 16-core versions with 4-core GPUs and up to 16-core 12Xe versions with 12-core GPUs. They all support faster memory (though at different speeds), as well as Wi-Fi 7 (R2) and Bluetooth Core 6.