Intel CEO Teases First Look At Upcoming Panther Lake CPU With Xe3 GPU
Lenovo held its 2024 Tech World event this week and about midway through, Intel chief executive officer (CEO) Pat Gelsinger hopped on stage to discuss the artificial intelligence (AI) era, which he likened to being as disruptive as when the internet first burst onto the scene. He also touched on Intel's collaboration with AMD to form a new x86 advisory group, though the real highlights for geeks like ourselves is when Gelsinger pulled a Panther Lake processor out of his pocket.
The came at around the 56min54sec mark of Lenovo's keynote, which spans over two hours in its entirety. Here it is, timed stamped just a tad earlier for some context...
"Just one more thing before I leave the stage," Gelsinger begins. "You know, we were working together on Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake and the Core Ultra PC—great battery life, CPU, GPU, NPU, but we're not done, are we? So I would like to give you your first Panther Lake sample. This is our next-year product on 18A that will be launching to build on the great work that we just announced today. Isn't that cool?"
While an unexpected teaser, it's not surprising that Gelsinger had an actual Panther Lake chip to show off at the event. It was revealed just a couple of months ago that Intel was working on samples of both Panther Lake CPUs for mobile platforms and Clearwater Forest server chips, with pre-production parts that are capable of booting into an operating system.
Panther Lake, along with Clearwater Forest will be the first to leverage Intel's 18A manufacturing process. Part of that entails a die shrink, but it also includes notable fabrication advancements, including RibbonFET gate-all-around FETs and Intel's PowerVia backside power delivery technology.
Panther Lake continues with Intel's tiled architecture, but with new P-cores and E-cores underneath the hood. A recent leak suggests that Intel's Core Ultra 300 series CPUs based on Panther Lake will feature up to 16 cores comprising the company's Cougar Cove (P-cores) and Darkmont (E-cores) architectures, the latter of which is a revised form of Skymont.
It's also expected that Panther Lake will introduce Intel's Xe3 graphics architecture. Intel hasn't yet released its Xe2 graphics in discrete form, otherwise known as Arc Battlemage, though Lunar Lake sports integrated Xe2 graphics. Like the Xe2 graphics in Lunar Lake, Xe3 in Panther Lake will be low-power variants.
Panther Lake will also tout a 5th generation neural processing unit (NPU) for more AI grunt compared to its 4th generation NPU with 48 TOPS.
