As Intel prepares to launch its first Arrow Lake processors in the coming weeks, it’s also busying itself with work on its future architectures. Panther Lake should be the next to emerge, complete with Xe3 ‘Celestial’ GPUs, but there’s no word on when we’ll see desktop or mobile processors using it. However, it could be sooner than we anticipated, following a surprise stunt from CEO Pat Gelsinger.
Gelsinger took to the stage alongside Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing at the latter company’s Tech World 24 event. While his appearance mostly concerned the partnership between the chip and tech manufacturers, the Intel boss didn’t arrive without gifts. In closing, Gelsinger handed Yuanqing the first sample of a Panther Lake processor. While particulars on the chip are thin, we do know that it owes its origins to Intel’s own 18A process node.
Mirroring recent designs, Intel Panther Lake should be modular in its design. Rumours suggest the compute tile will house up to six Cougar Cove performance cores, alongside eight Darkmont efficient cores. Four Low-Power Efficient Cores could also make an appearance, for the first time since Meteor Lake. Most importantly, though, Panther Lake chips should mark the debut of Xe3 cores, the successor to Lunar Lake’s graphics (and upcoming discrete Battlemage graphics cards).
While we don’t have any performance estimates, Pat did mention that Panther Lake’s NPU5 will be two times faster than Lunar Lake’s NPU4. The latter also being three times faster than the NPU3 inside Meteor Lake. These generational performance improvements should hopefully see more AI tasks run locally rather than on the cloud, improving security and privacy.
It hopefully shouldn’t be too long before we see Panther Lake in action. While it’s possible that Intel plans to launch the architecture in 2025, this would step on the toes of Arrow Lake mobile devices that should arrive at the beginning of the year. As such, 2026 seems like a safer bet, but nothing’s set in stone until Gelsinger says otherwise.
