Intel looks set to supercharge thin-and-light laptops to fight back at Apple, as leak shows off powerful 16-core Panther Lake chip

Intel’s future Panther Lake processors for laptops have been the subject of a couple of fresh leaks recently, with the latest giving us some purported chip configurations of the CPUs that’ll succeed Lunar Lake (next-gen mobile processors arriving later in 2024).

Bear in mind this is just a rumor, but as posted by Jaykihn on X, there’s a die configuration image plus some core counts of Panther Lake U series (low-power) and H series (high performance) processors. The latter top CPU runs with 16-cores (4 performance, 8 efficiency, 4 low-power) and 12 Xe3 graphics cores (that’s Celestial – the follow-up to next-gen Battlemage, which is in Lunar Lake).

VideoCardz reports that the mobile model for Panther Lake with 12 Xe3 cores might be a P series (rather than H), meaning enthusiast performance for trimmer laptops (which makes sense given the beefier Celestial integrated graphics, ideal for thin-and-light laptops). That info is provided by another regular leaker on X, OneRaichu, by the way.

At any rate, the core configurations seem on the money, even if the exact details aren’t nailed down – as Moore’s Law is Dead’s latest video also aired this top-end Panther Lake CPU as a 4+8+4 configuration.

As for the low-end Panther Lake offering (U series), that’s going to run with 4 performance cores and 4 low-power (with no efficiency cores), and a 15W power envelope (as opposed to 25W for the other chips). It’ll have 4 Xe3 graphics cores, apparently – but take all of this with a suitable dose of seasoning, as ever.

Analysis: Intel’s Core Ultra 300 duet

Panther Lake is expected to arrive later in 2025, likely a year after Lunar Lake lands (though maybe a bit earlier – Intel has certainly confirmed that Panther Lake chips are on track, and they were recently powered on too).

While in the past, it was thought Panther Lake would perhaps be desktop and mobile, it’s clear now this is a laptop-only Lunar Lake successor – part of Intel’s Core Ultra 300 family next year.

The other side of Core Ultra 300, the desktop parts, will be Arrow Lake Refresh, which will be exactly what the name suggests – a refresh of next-gen Arrow Lake. Again, that should arrive a year after Arrow Lake, late in 2025 (most likely).

So, we should have all these Core Ultra 300 CPUs to follow next-gen models by the end of 2025, though much like Lunar Lake, volume production of laptops with Panther Lake won’t kick off until the following year, 2026 in this case.

Arrow Lake Refresh will likely be a relatively modest step forward, given that it’s only a refresh – much like current-gen Raptor Lake Refresh was hardly revolutionary, too – though Panther Lake is going to be a bigger move. On top of third-gen Celestial graphics, we’re also going to see a seriously beefy NPU – Lunar Lake is already shooting high on the latter front, and with Panther Lake, Intel has already told us to expect up to double the AI performance.

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