One of the novelties of this year was the so-called Copilot+ PC promoted by Microsoft, whose special feature is the ability to run AI applications locally (and thus privately) directly on the device itself thanks to the powerful NPU. So far, only Snapdragon X from Qualcomm, AMD Ryzen AI 300 and Lunar Lake meet the requirements for Copilot+ PC, older processors do not. But it seems that in the next generation, all laptop processors could already have support.
A bit like how we learned in advance some time ago that Lunar Lake will contain a significantly enhanced NPU (it had a promised 3x higher performance in TOPS against Meteor Lake, precisely because of Copilot+ PC), now information about the NPU in the next generation of Intel processors – Core Ultra 300 “Panther Lake”.
NPU 5th generation
Intel has sent patches to support Panther Lake processors for the Linux kernel, and this code confirmed that Panther Lake will get a new generation of NPUs. Panther Lake is even supposed to have the fifth according to Intel’s marking, but the first two generations should still mark separate Movidius chips, from which Intel’s NPU technologies are based. The processors first appeared in the third generation, which is in Meteor Lake, and Lunar Lake has a newer and more powerful fourth generation.
So Panther Lake will again be one NPU generation higher than Lunar Lake. This also likely means that these CPUs will have NPUs with similar or higher performance than Lunar Lake and will be able to provide those 40 TOPS minimum to support Copilot+ PC features. So if this idea succeeds and becomes popular in a year, Intel will have a product ready for a more mass market. In contrast, in the Core Ultra 200 generation, Copilot+ only supports Lunar Lake, which is a more exclusive and relatively expensive product. For more mass deployment, Intel has more conventional Arrow Lake processors, which are said to have low-performance NPUs roughly at Meteor Lake level (around 13 TOPS), so they are not eligible for Copilot+.
Intel Lunar Lake has Intel’s 4th generation NPU (the first two generations were separate Movidius “VPUs”)
Panther Lake are notebook processors that should conceptually follow Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake – they have more chiplets, higher core counts, and won’t use on-package memory either. It is not yet entirely clear whether Intel intends these processors just as a replacement for Arrow Lake for notebooks, or if the “ordinary” Panther Lake is also intended to be a replacement for the current special Lunar Lake for the ultra-mobile area. But one possibility is that the Lunar Lake simply has a two-year life cycle and will continue to be sold in parallel with the Panther Lake in the 300 generation, so it would be replaced by another similar ultra-mobile design in the 400 generation (Nova Lake).
Only in laptops
It’s worth noting that Intel doesn’t intend to release Panther Lake for the desktop in the Core Ultra 300 generation, so that new NPU will remain a notebook thing. In the desktop, only Arrow Lake processors will probably be available from Intel for the next two years, and thus the weak NPU with 13 TOPS performance (and thus no Copilot+). Intel originally wanted to release an Arrow Lake refresh in 2025, which would add more powerful NPUs for desktop processors as well, which Copilot+ could support. But that plan has been canceled, so a better NPU and Copilot+ PC won’t arrive in the desktop until probably 2026 with Core Ultra 400 “Nova Lake” processors.
Even AMD probably won’t provide an NPU capable of meeting the demands of Copilot+ in desktop processors in the foreseeable future, because the newly released Ryzen 9000s don’t have an NPU unit at all (and we still don’t know when the next generation with the Zen 6 architecture will be released). But the exception will be desktop APUs, which form a less popular secondary branch of AMD desktop processors. If the company releases a desktop version of the Ryzen AI 300 (“Strix Point”) processors, it could be the first desktop processor that will be powerful enough (in terms of NPU) for Copilot+. But the desktop version of these APUs for socket AM5 is also not confirmed yet.
Resources: Phoronix, VideoCardz
Source: www.cnews.cz
