Intel’s next-generation cell processor, “Panther Lake,” builds incrementally on the superb “Lunar Lake” chip populating laptops proper now. But there’s one thing odd afoot: a “16-core, 12 Xe graphics cores” model that could possibly be Intel’s reply to AMD’s Ryzen AI Max, full with multi-frame graphics era powered by AI.
Intel has formally revealed its new Panther Lake structure, and it offers lovers quite a bit to chew on: a return to the efficiency (P-cores), effectivity (E-cores), and low-power effectivity (LP E-cores) cores of Intel’s first Core Ultra chip, Meteor Lake. Intel has returned with a fifth-generation NPU able to 50 TOPS and a picture processing unit (IPU) that really makes use of AI for some features.
Intel’s “Xe3” GPU is price some dialogue all by itself, with its awkward branding and highly effective multi-frame era that may probably elevate body charges three or 4 occasions what they have been earlier than. Can Panther Lake tackle mainstream laptops, handheld PCs, and this new breed of “AI workstations” AMD’s Strix Halo is aiming for? Well, with three separate processors, possibly. Intel’s confidence in its 18A producing course of could also be a bit overblown, nonetheless, as a number of parts of Panther Lake are nonetheless being manufactured abroad, together with the 12Xe model of the brand new, disaggregated (separate) GPU tile.
In phrases of efficiency, we all know some additional particulars. Intel says that Panther Lake’s single-threaded efficiency needs to be 10 p.c greater than Lunar Lake on the similar energy. Compared to each Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, Intel’s Panther Lake gives greater than 50 p.c higher multithreaded efficiency, Intel says. Intel can also be claiming that the overall Panther Lake system-on-chip will eat 10 p.c much less energy than Lunar Lake, and demonstrated a trio of laptops working a Core Ultra chip from every era to again that up. Some of this will likely be as a result of design of the chips; some will come from the method expertise, together with the 18A producing course of that’s change into a vital a part of Intel’s future.
Intel
Intel launched Lunar Lake at Computex 2024, and we had Lunar Lake benchmarking accomplished by late September. (Intel’s been talking up Panther Lake for over a year, too.) Intel representatives have been fairly clear that CES 2026 in January would be the launch occasion for Panther Lake laptops, and they’ll come to market quickly after. I believe that Panther Lake will likely be marketed because the Core Ultra Series 3, however that’s simply an informed guess.
“Panther Lake literally combines the power efficiency of Lunar Lake and the performance of Arrow Lake in a product family, and we’re using Intel 18A to bring these architectures together,” Jim Johnson, the senior vp accountable for Intel’s Client Computing Group, stated at Intel’s launch occasion in Phoenix.
Intel can also be fairly happy with its 18A course of, the muse of Panther Lake, which Intel fellow Tom Petersen known as the costliest die Intel has ever made. “We can confidently say Intel Foundry is in production on the only two nanometer class process that was developed and will be manufactured here in the United States,” Kevin O’Buckley, the senior vp and common supervisor of Intel Foundry Services.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Intel’s Panther Lake: what are the options of its three chips?
Intel sometimes describes the structure of its upcoming processors throughout its “Tech Tour” conferences just like the one it held to explain Panther Lake close to Phoenix, then offers the speeds, options, and costs of the particular processors you’ll have the ability to purchase at launch. This was a mixture of the 2: some particulars we all know, and a few we don’t. Contrast that to Qualcomm’s launch event of the rival Snapdragon X2 Elite: we all know how briskly every chip is and what number of cores are inside them, however not the deep particulars of their structure.
Right now, Intel’s “Panther Lake” consists of three chips, primarily consisting of the brand new “Cougar Cove” P-core and the “Darkmont” E-core and LP E-cores:
- An 8-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 4 low-power (LP) E-cores; 4 Xe3 GPU cores and 4 ray-tracing items; and reminiscence interfaces to both 6800 MT/s LPDDR5x or 6400 MT/s DDR5.
- A 16-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 4 LP E-cores; 4 Xe3 GPU cores and 4 ray-tracing items; and reminiscence interfaces to both 8533 MTs/ LPDDR5x or 7200 MT/s DDR5.
- A 16-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 4 LP E-cores, 12 Xe3 GPU cores and 12 ray-tracing items; and reminiscence interfaces to 9600MT/s LPDDR5x, interval.
Intel
We don’t know the way a lot energy Panther Lake will eat; one govt on Intel’s advertising staff stated that Panther Lake is “expanding on the segment that we addressed with Lunar Lake,” and that the chip energy or TDP will go “up and down” from there. That will clearly have an effect on which merchandise Intel’s Panther Lake chip will match into. Gameplay demos of an up to date Painkiller recreation working on the chip used each a 45-watt reference platform in addition to a 30-watt laptop computer, and Intel’s Petersen referred to a “max” of 44 watts.
In whole, Panther Lake can tackle as much as 96 GB of LPDDR5x reminiscence or 128GB of DDR5 reminiscence.
Intel’s Panther Lake is split into tiles, or what rival AMD calls “chiplets”: a disaggregated design that enables tiles to be positioned and swapped out and in. (Intel even supplied a knockoff Lego package of Panther Lake as a tchotchke.) In Panther Lake, there’s a compute tile, a GPU tile, a platform controller tile, and a “base tile” that the opposite tiles are mounted upon. All of the tiles are linked collectively through a second-gen scalable I/O material. The base tile connects to the lively tiles through Foveros 2.5D packaging expertise, permitting Intel to stack die one on prime of the opposite.
Intel
According to Johnson, the disaggregated tiles means extra PC segments and extra worth factors. “Panther Lake will be the most broadly adopted, globally available AI PC platform Intel has ever delivered,” he stated.
Right now, none of those Panther Lake chips have product names, and Intel isn’t telling us how briskly they’ll run both in sustained or in turbo mode. But they won’t have hyperthreading; from Meteor Lake on, Intel rearchitected its performance cores to ship excessive sufficient single-thread efficiency with out the necessity to add a further thread. Intel chief govt Lip-Bu Tan has called this decision a mistake, however Intel’s plan to get rid of hyperthreading was already baked into the design.
The GPU tile is saved separate. Separating the GPU tile theoretically implies that Intel might simply “drop in” a substitute, although it’s a bit extra sophisticated than that. Still, it’s pure to see this and the eventual RTX chiplets being talked about as part of Intel’s Nvidia investment as two factors on the identical line — although Intel fastidiously declined to substantiate this.
Here’s a element you could discover intriguing: the 16-core, 12 Xe3 chip isn’t designed to hook up with a discrete GPU, and that chip solely comprises a complete of 12 PCI Express lanes as a consequence. The 16-core, 4 Xe3 model consists of 20 PCIe lanes, which definitely implies that this model could seem in gaming laptops. Intel executives stated that there’s nothing there stopping 16-core, 4Xe3 chip from connecting to a discrete GPU, in order that appears seemingly.
“The 8-core will service the thin-and-light [market], the second [16-core version] with the small GPU is going to be attached to a discrete GPU, and the big one will have a life of its own, said Fuad Abazovic, principal at ACAnalysis. “It’s whatever you like with Lunar Lake, but with double the cores and much wider, much bigger GPU, but you still keep the battery life.”
Mark Hachman / Foundry
The 8-core Panther Lake chip could have 12 PCIe lanes (8 PCIe 4, 4 PCIe 5), whereas the 16-core chip could have 20 PCIe lanes (8 PCIe 4, and 12 PCIe 5). The 16-core, 12Xe Panther Lake choice drops again right down to the 12 PCIe lanes and configuration of the 8-core chip.
Also of curiosity: built-in Thunderbolt 4, however not Thunderbolt 5. That means one other yr’s price of Thunderbolt 4 docks, with discrete Thunderbolt 5 controllers in all probability solely connected to expensive gaming PCs.
Enthusiasts shouldn’t actually care which course of expertise Intel will use to make its chips, although Intel has been practically determined to win clients for Panther Lake’s 18A producing course of and the next 14A course of which is able to observe it. It needed to be embarrassing for Intel to make Lunar Lake’s key tiles at rival TSMC. Now, Intel has began to carry its manufacturing in home as soon as once more. All of the compute tiles are manufactured on Intel’s 18A course of, however the entire platform controller tiles are made at TSMC, as nicely the 12 Xe3-core GPU tile. The different 4 Xe3 GPU tiles will likely be manufactured on Intel’s Intel 3 course of.
Panther Lake CPUs: Cougar Cove, Darkmont, and higher consumer changes
Inside the CPU tile are the P- and E-cores, the NPU 5, plus what’s often called the Image Processing Unit 7.5 in addition to the reminiscence interface.
Panther Lake is a system on a chip, so referring to it as a “CPU” isn’t precisely appropriate. But onboard Panther Lake are two separate CPU architectures: the “Cougar Cove” efficiency cores, and the “Darkmont” effectivity cores. Stephen Robinson, its chief CPU architect and an Intel fellow, traced the roadmap: Lunar Lake had two kinds of cores, nevertheless it couldn’t scale to a excessive frequency. Arrow Lake’s Skymont effectivity cores improved efficiency, however didn’t supply all-day battery. Lunar Lake provided devoted energy supply for the E cores, and added extra cache reminiscence, for a complete of as much as 18MB shared level-3 cache.
Essentially, Panther Lake takes the low-power islands of Lunar Lake, combines them with the extra cores earlier generations provided, and upgrades the efficiency cores for improved single-thread efficiency. (The latter facet is often what will get attributed to how fast and responsive an OS is, at the least within the MacOS world.)
Intel’s new 18A course of additionally gives what’s known as “backside power delivery,” or PowerVia, which routes energy away from the sign logic. That improves frequency whereas decreasing idle energy loss — each precisely what Intel wished to realize.
According to Robinson, Cougar Cove is “optimized” for 18A, with higher department prediction and reminiscence disambiguation. In Darkmont, Intel achieved higher prefetching. It additionally applied what it calls “nanocode,” the place Intel has taken some microcode and added the flexibility to decode in every of its parallel front-end clusters, Robinson stated.
It all works out to 40 p.c decrease energy for the complete Panther Lake chip on the similar efficiency of Arrow Lake, or 10 p.c extra efficiency on the similar energy, Intel executives stated.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Intel additionally exposes how duties will likely be routed by means of every kind of core by means of a expertise known as Thread Director. In Panther Lake, Thread Director ought to really feel acquainted: a workload will first land on the low-power E-cores, then transfer to the full-power E-cores if it proves an excessive amount of for the low-power cores. From there, it will likely be pushed to the efficiency cores, Rajshree Chabukswar, the Intel fellow accountable for the expertise, stated.
Intel’s expertise can also be sensible sufficient to auto-assign some threads primarily based on the applying, so Microsoft Teams will all the time start on the LP E-cores and certain stay there. A benchmark like Cinebench, which asks for all cores and threads, will get them throughout all three several types of cores. In video games, nonetheless, Panther Lake can do one thing fascinating: assign the sport to E-Cores, then to P-cores…however then use among the leftover energy and provides it to the GPU.
“Using OS containment zones and some of our graphics driver hints and our power management, we are able to deliver 10 percent [more] frame rate because we are making power headroom available to graphics,” Chabukswar stated.
Normally, customers can modify the Windows 11 efficiency by adjusting the Windows energy slider. With Panther Lake, Intel goes a bit additional with what it’s calling the Intelligent Experience Optimizer. Intel already has the Dynamic Tuning Utility, which makes use of AI to dynamically optimize the system for efficiency, battery life, or thermals — just like the “AI Mode” in an MSI laptop computer’s system settings. Most gaming laptops have already got “turbo” or “silent” modes, however the impression that Intel offers is that customers could have extra enter into how the laptop computer performs.
“It’s purely load-driven. When I see that I need more performance, it will move there,” Chabukswar stated. “When I see that I need more efficiency, it will move there automatically.”
Mark Hachman / Foundry
In two examples, UL Procyon’s Office Productivity benchmark and the single-threaded Cinebench 2024 benchmark, turning on Intelligent Experience Optimizer boosted efficiency by 19 p.c on each checks.
Panther Lake GPU: 50 p.c higher efficiency than Lunar Lake
Intel’s built-in graphics path continues: Meteor Lake included Xe, Lunar Lake added a Xe2 GPU, and Panther Lake strikes to Xe3. The killer promoting level? Multi-frame era, which injects AI-generated frames between precise rendered frames.
However, there’s a problem with branding. Intel’s “Battlemage” discrete GPU was thought of a part of the Xe2 era, whereas Intel’s Panther Lake contained “Xe3” cores. Yet each Battlemage and Panther Lake are additionally each a part of the Intel Arc B-series of merchandise, which doesn’t make a lot sense. Intel did present a roadmap that indicators a “Xe3P” variant is coming, nonetheless.
Panther Lake, from what Intel confirmed, could have each 4Xe and 12Xe variants. Not the whole lot scales linearly; whereas the 32 XMX engines on the 4Xe variant triples to 96 within the 12 Xe model, the quantity of level-2 cache quadruples from 4MB to 16MB.
Who is the 12Xe model of Panther Lake aimed toward? “The cheesy answer is ‘everybody,” stated Daniel Rogers, vp and common supervisor of PC merchandise at Intel, in an interview. “I think you’ll see it show up in a few ways, One, maybe the most obvious is for gamers. In some gaming designs and some handhelds as well — that’s a good fit.”
Rogers stated the 12-Xe Panther Lake will even be the “flagship solution for commercial notebooks on the AI side,” Rogers stated.
Is it Intel’s reply to AMD’s Strix Halo? “Everybody’s chasing high-performance local AI, and we will certainly do the same,” Rogers stated.
The Xe3 engine additionally improves the ray tracing, eliminating backups within the pipeline by means of a brand new thread sorting unit. It additionally doubles the anisotropic filtering on die, Petersen stated.
The Xe3 GPU was re-designed for scalability, Petersen stated. In the GPU’s render slice, Intel elevated the variety of Xe cores from 4 to 6, elevated the extent 1 cache from 192 kilobytes to 256KB, and upgraded the level-2 cache from 8 megabytes to 16MB, decreasing the necessity to entry the native reminiscence and growing efficiency. Intel additionally moved to a variable allocation technique when assigning threads, with “dramatic” results on efficiency, Petersen stated.
While Intel declined to point out precise benchmarks, Petersen did present how site visitors to the SOC’s reminiscence material dropped by 17 p.c to 36 p.c on key video games. He additionally demonstrated some “micro benchmarks,” or inner checks that Intel itself makes use of to find out generation-over-generation efficiency in particular duties. The X3 structure additionally improves the best way by which a body is rendered, together with DirectX calls and pre-rendering, however Petersen stated actual features have been granted by the bigger level-1 cache. All advised, Intel was in a position to lower the time to execute one body to about 22.84ms on the 12Xe chip, versus 45.44ms for Lunar Lake.
Essentially, Intel can generate about 50 p.c greater GPU efficiency than Lunar Lake, or about 40 p.c extra efficiency per watt than Lunar Lake, Petersen stated.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
Multiframe AI rendering hits Panther Lake’s built-in graphics
The Xe3 GPU additionally helps cooperative vectors, which Intel showed off with Microsoft this June. Cooperative vectors use AI as a solution to change the overwhelming requirement for shaders. Microsoft has also proposed storing them in tbe cloud. Cooperative vectors, in Petersen’s phrases, primarily “replace that render pipeline, that raster process, with a 3D model.”
“So effectively, we can completely eliminate the render pipeline and replace it with a per pixel AI,” Petersen added.
“You can see this might be kind of a look forward into a future where graphics is really substantially different, and it is primarily AI,” Petersen added.
That future is already right here…type of. XeSS 2, launched alongside Intel’s “Battlemage” GPUs, launched XeSS Super Resolution, XeSS Frame Generation, and Xe Low Latency, all designed to hurry up the graphics powering video video games. XeSS Frame Generation injected an AI-generated body between two “real,” rendered frames, and used the low-latency expertise to offset the delay that engendered.
“Hybrid rendering is kind of where we are for most titles today,” Petersen stated. “Things have indeed moved forward, and we are now into the world of hybrid rendering, plus AI. And in this world, not all pixels are rastered. In fact, most pixels are not rastered. They are generated.”
Now, Intel has launched XeSS-MFG, or XeSS Multiframe Generation, which may inject as many as three extra interpolated frames, along with the present upscaling and multiframe era applied sciences. You’ll have the ability to management it as paert of Intel’s current Intel Graphics Software package deal, the place you’ll have the choice of setting the extra frames, or letting the applying itself make that call, Petersen stated. That software program will even supply choices comparable to specifying how a lot system reminiscence is shared with the GPU, a feature Intel announced earlier and that AMD has exploited for better AI.
The thought is easy: extra frames means a smoother gaming expertise, and happier players with PCs which may exceed playable body charges. Even video games designed to profit from XeSS 2 will help XeSS 3, Petersen stated.
Yes, these frames will introduce lag. Each generated body will add about 1.5 milliseconds of latency per body, with about 1 ms of setup, Petersen stated, or about 6 ms per three generated frames. That’s unhealthy when the body price is all the time excessive, he stated, however when body charges are at 25 to 30 fps, the latency isn’t as unhealthy versus the worth of the added frames.
According to Petersen, the latency or lag that bothers players isn’t actually the “click to photon” latency the place there’s a delay within the participant’s motion. The extra noticeable lag is what he known as “motion to photon,” the place the latency between a consumer’s enter and perceived movement creates nausea in VR and wobble when mousing. Eventually, that could possibly be solved by AI prediction of mouse actions or a variable price of rasterized to AI- rendered frames.
“There’s a whole bunch of technologies that have not been announced, that are not done, that could make that [latency] better, but right now you can see some,” Petersen added. “And if you’re more latency sensitive, depending on the game type, I would say, turn off frames and just run regular frames.”
In addition to working towards cooperative vectors, Intel can also be launching precompiled shader distribution, the place your PC doesn’t have to attend to compile shaders, it simply downloads precompiled shaders from the cloud. It can also be growing Intelligent Bias Control model 3, first launched this summer season, by which the CPU and GPU discuss to 1 one other and route energy to the suitable logic. It’s the complement to Thread Director, the place GPU efficiency could possibly be elevated by 10 p.c by that expertise alone.
Finally, Intel’s PresentMon software program will differentiate between rasterized and rendered/generated frames, and supply a sign whether or not a given body was actual. It will even exhibit animation stutter, if frames are out of sync.
According to James Sanders, a senior analyst at TechInsights, stated that there’s potential for making a marketplace for thin-and-light gaming laptops with the 16-core, 12Xe3 Panther Lake half.
“Games which can be like Marvel Rivals I might think about can be a extremely good match for that kind of {hardware},” Sanders stated. “If you’re doing esports, that’s one thing that might be a superb match. But for those who’re taking part in Final Fantasy, the place you’re frightened extra in regards to the graphics efficiency, you’ll need to go to a discrete GPU. But it’s clear that that speaking what that market goes to be one thing that Intel and their OEMs must work on, and that’s going to take time.”
Panther Lake’s NPU: simpler, however not a lot adjustments
The story of Panther Lake’s NPU: it’s about the identical as Lunar Lake, simply extra environment friendly. Lunar Lake’s NPU 4 supported 48 TOPS. The NPU 5 inside Panther Lake helps 50 TOPS in a a lot smaller package deal.
An NPU principally performs a ton of multiply-accumulate operations, carried out by what’s often called a MAC array. Lunar Lake and Panther Lake each have the identical variety of MACs — 12,000 — however Lunar Lake unfold these out into six neural compute engines, whereas Panther Lake has solely three. Panther Lake’s NPU 5 additionally has 4.5MB of scratchpad RAM, 256KB of level-2 cache, and 6 SHAVE DSPs. Panther Lake’s NPU can carry out 4,096 MACs/cycle at int8 (8-bit integer), 4.096 MACs/cycle at FP8 (8-bit floating-point), and a couple of,048 MACs/cycle at FP16. Those numbers change into extra important and extra acquainted whenever you’re performing generative AI features, the place you’re specifying the complexity of a specific process.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
“What we really wanted was more MACs and less of the other stuff,” Petersen stated.
Some of the enhancements are simply Intel attempting to be smarter about the way it handles information. Running Stable Diffusion’s AI artwork generator, the algorithm doesn’t actually need the extra complicated FP16 granularity. Instead, FP8 can be utilized; in Petersen’s instance, vitality utilization dropped 35 p.c from 108 joules to 70 joules.
Panther Lake additionally consists of what’s often called the Image Processing Unit 7.5, chargeable for taking the picture your PC’s webcam sees and making it look its greatest.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
“That means handling the full spectrum of lighting from bright outdoor sunlight streaming in through a window to dim corners of a warehouse at night,” stated Tomer Rider, the IPU product advertising supervisor. “It means capturing and preserving fine details and high resolutions without introducing the noise, so what you see is crisp and accurate. It also means creating a life like natural image, vivid colors, true to life, skin tones and high frame rate that makes everything feel real wherever you are and whatever the line is, the IPU makes sure that the image looks its best.”
For Panther Lake, the IPU does three issues: it provides enhanced HDR for wider dynamic vary, and consists of AI-based noise discount and AI-based tone mapping. The “staggered HDR” takes each a brief publicity and an extended publicity and merges them collectively. All of those work with each built-in laptop computer webcams in addition to standalone gadgets. Up to 5 Mpixel sensors are supported, which interprets to 2560 x 1920 pixels in the true world, all whie shaving off 1.5 watts or so of energy.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
AI noise discount truly makes use of AI to filter out noise, particularly in low-light environments, Rider stated. And tone mapping divides up a picture or video into totally different areas, then makes use of AI to enhance the visuals.
In this case, the IPU could also be truly asking the NPU to carry out these features. “Either the NPU or the GPU” will deal with the AI, Rider stated. “We’re working with all the NPU and GPU teams in order to make sure that the system makes the right choice when selecting whether it’s the GPU or the NPU.”
Panther Lake’s wi-fi options are surprisingly cool
Finally, Panther Lake additionally features a wi-fi module, which locations the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi MAC onto the chip and separates the rest right into a separate die contained in the package deal, often called Whale Peak 2. Panther Lake helps each Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth Core 6.0, however with some neat twists.
The most fascinating wi-fi options Panther Lake provides are a part of Bluetooth. Panther Lake now helps Auracast, a wi-fi expertise launched in 2024 that helps simultaneous playback throughout a number of gadgets, so that you just don’t should share an earbud with a good friend. Intel’s chip additionally helps platform sounding, which makes use of distance- and phase-change modeling to trace the gap between two gadgets, to higher find them rapidly. Bluetooth additionally makes use of each wi-fi antennas, and never only one, which ought to lengthen Bluetooth connectivity. Intel fellow and wi-fi CTO Carlos Cordeiro used 52 meters for instance distance.
Panther Lake truly helps what’s often called Wi-Fi 7 Release 2, which haven’t been formally licensed. Basically, the R2 options facilitate higher communication between the entry level and your PC, leading to fewer dropped connections and improved communication pace and latency, Multilink reconfiguration permits the router to shift your PC from one channel to the opposite, whereas restricted TWT permits the 2 to determine which purposes (and gadgets) deserve essentially the most precedence. Single-link eMLSR permits one of many two antennas in your laptop computer to “sniff” out a special channel, and rapidly shift if it opens up. It additionally permits the laptop computer to sign of it’s utilizing a channel for peer-to-peer communication.
You in all probability don’t use Intel’s Connectivity Performance Suite, a small Windows app which lets you see the assorted entry factors accessible to your PC and permits it to prioritize voice and video calls or streaming apps. Intel is including AI to this checklist of choices, so if yor PC is having a protracted session with a cloud service like ChatGPT, you’ll be able to make sure that that site visitors is given precedence.
What’s subsequent for Panther Lake?
Intel’s deep dive within the desert definitely opened the doorways to disclose a lot of options about Intel’s next-gen cell chip. What we nonetheless don’t know is what number of variations of the chip itself will finally ship, and what they’ll be known as. Reports from Asia now point out that the 12Xe model will likely be branded because the Core Ultra X, to distinguish them from the “vanilla” model of the Core Ultra chip itself.
Naturally, we’ll have to attend even longer for the primary efficiency testing of the chip itself, in addition to the next bulletins of laptops utilizing the chip. Those ought to occur at or close to the time of the CES 2026 present in January, we’re advised. It’s there we must always anticipate buyer bulletins, as nicely.
It was a little bit shocking to not see any future Intel CPU roadmaps, in any respect, after Panther Lake has been talked about for over a yr. “Nova Lake” needs to be the following step.
“Meteor Lake served its purpose,” stated Mario Morales, the group vp and common supervisor of semiconductors at IDC. “You needed to have a dog in the race. That can be easily relegated into the lower end. Lunar Lake came in and hit the sweet spot, and it did emphasize a lot more performance efficiency, which I think was another important message for them as they introduced new P-cores and E-cores into the…PC space. Panther Lake is important for them, as it’s the next step. Nova Lake is what gets them to par — with AMD for sure, but also maybe with Apple.”
Still, we now know details of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite in addition to Intel’s Panther Lake. Waiting within the wings: AMD. Is Gorgon Point the next name you’ll must find out about in laptop computer processors for 2026?
Disclosure: Intel held its press briefings in Phoenix, and wouldn’t pre-brief reporters in different places or over video conferences. The firm paid for my room, boarding, and journey bills, however didn’t ask for or exert any editorial management over this story or different PCWorld content material.