Yesterday, information leaked on the Internet confirming that Intel, despite the arrival of the new LGA 1851 platform and Arrow Lake processors, will keep the LGA 1700 platform on the market in parallel and will release completely new Bartlett Lake processors for it, breaking away from the currently minted big.LITTLE paradigm by removing small cores and they will add another big one. But to make sure the news wasn’t enough, the same source also revealed the details of the 1.8nm Intel Panther Lake mobile processors.
Again, the same leaker Jaykihn, who not long ago began to leak information from internal documents on Twitter, after information about Bartlett Lake, revealed the case diagram of the Panther Lake processor, as well as the parameters of its laptop versions (Panther Lake desktop processors were canceled).
Panther Lake for notebooks will exist in two versions – the more economical PTL-U and the more powerful PTL-H. Both will have a BGA case. At least Panther Lake-H seems to be based more on the Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake line of processors, which have more chiplets, than the ultra-mobile Lunar Lake, which is more optimized for lower power consumption and maximum battery life.
However, it is probably not excluded that the Panther Lake-U version will, on the contrary, have a design similar to the Lunar Lake processors (i.e., for example, with LPDDR5X or LPDDR6 memory directly on the processor case). It’s possible that Panther Lake-U will even be a direct successor to Lunar Lake, so that these ultra-mobile processors, aiming to directly compete with ARM chips such as Apple’s M-series processors, will no longer represent a separate family as in the case of Lunar Lake.
Panther Lake-H
The more powerful Panther Lake-H processors will still use the memory installed externally on the notebook’s board. They will be composed of three main active chiplets. The largest chiplet is the “Compute Tile” with CPU cores. A chiplet with an integrated GPU will be installed next to it, which will therefore still be on its own chiplet. On the side of them will be an elongated PCH chiplet that has chipset functions and provides connectivity. All of this is mounted on a basic Base Tile. The remaining free space in the corners of the upper layer should still be covered by the fourth and fifth chiplets, but they are just fillers for strengthening without active electronics.
The configuration will be: four large cores (perhaps with the Cougar Cove architecture), eight efficient E-Core cores (perhaps with the Darkmont architecture) and there will also be four LP E-Cores in the processor, which should probably be cores placed outside the main interconnect logic of the cores CPU and outside L3 cache. In case of inactivity or low loads, the system would use only these energy-saving cores, thus saving the battery. Interestingly, Panther Lake will have fewer large cores than Meteor Lake (it has a 6+8+2 configuration, while here it’s 4+8+4). Intel apparently wants to rely more on E-Cores, whose performance is increasing.
Two iGPU variants
The integrated graphics will exist in two variants – the weaker one with four Xe Cores, which should mean 512 shaders. This will probably be used in cheaper processors, or in processors intended for laptops, where a separate GPU will be added. The more powerful version has 12 Xe Cores, i.e. 1536 shaders – the plan that Intel originally had for Meteor Lake processors will finally be fulfilled. This integrated graphics could be very powerful, so we’ll see how AMD competes with it.
The graphics are supposed to be of “Xe3” (about Xe3 LPG) architecture, which should match the Arc third generation “Celestial” discrete graphics. This was already reported by older leaks, which may be confirmed by this. So the performance per GPU unit should hopefully be better than what Meteor Lake with the Xe1 LPG “Alchemist” architecture and Lunar Lake with the Xe2 “Battlemage” are currently achieving.
TDP reduction to 25W
The leaker states that Intel will reduce the TDP of mobile processors and Panther Lake-H will have a default TDP of only 25 W instead of 45 W. However, expect that notebook manufacturers will probably be able to increase it again, and in particular the maximum consumption in boost (so-called .PL2). The mere fact that the nominal TDP is 25 W may not mean much. This value otherwise applies to both GPU variants, i.e. both for PTL-H with 4+8+4 cores and 4× Xe Core, and for the version with 4+8+4 cores and 12× Xe Core.
Panther Lake-U: successor to Lunar Lake?
More mobile PTL-U processors could be different and closer to Lunar Lake, as already mentioned, for example by using on-package memory and fewer chiplets. However, we don’t have a schematic for them, nor is the number of chiplets known, so it’s not certain.
However, the core configuration looks very similar to Lunar Lake: four large Cougar Cove cores and four economical LP E-Core Darkmont cores. The middle tier with regular E-Core cores is dropped here, so the processor has 4+0+4 cores, just eight threads in total.
However, the integrated graphics have fewer cores than in Lunar Lake, which in turn makes it somewhat doubtful that it would be a direct successor. A less powerful configuration with four Xe Cores, i.e. 512 shaders, will also be used. So unless one core of the Celestial architecture has twice the number of units, so the 4× Xe Core variant would correspond to 1024 shaders (and the 12× Xe Core version even 3072 shaders).
The TDP of these processors will be 15 W, which corresponds to the Lunar Lake processors (17 W), but again we do not know the PL2, i.e. the maximum consumption during boosting. Incidentally, the leaker mentions that Panther Lake has a maximum operating temperature of 105°C (the same as Arrow Lake) according to Intel, while Lunar Lake has a maximum operating temperature of 100°C.
Although this is not mentioned anywhere in the leak, it can be expected that the Panther Lake notebook processors should arrive in the market about a year after the Arrow Lake notebook processors. Those are due out late this year or early next year, so Panther Lake should premiere sometime between 2025 and 2026. If it’s not delayed.
It is supposed to be the first processors manufactured by Intel’s 1.8nm (18A) process. After Intel had to favor TSMC’s 3nm process for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake, and the previous Meteor Lake processors with its 4nm process were inconsistent, this will be the first opportunity for Intel to prove that it is still (or again) at the forefront of silicon technology and can consider it a competitor of TSMC. So a lot depends on how Panther Lake performs.
Source: Jaykihn
Source: www.cnews.cz
