Since the middle of this year, there has been a lot of talk about Intel's upcoming laptop processor series called Panther Lake. Now, many of the secrets still kept behind this processor series have finally been revealed by Intel itself.
In short, the Panther Lake processor series, which is expected to be introduced as the Intel Core 300H/U and Intel Core Ultra 300H/U, is said to combine the processing power performance of the Intel Arrow Lake-H chip series and the battery power savings offered by the Intel Lunar Lake processor series for premium thin and light laptops.
After two generations of Intel processor chips built with the help of manufacturing by leading semiconductor chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Intel Panther Lake will be manufactured using Intel's latest 18A manufacturing technology.
Intel says that the Panther Lake processor series will come with 16 physical cores consisting of Cougar Cove (P-core) and Darkmont (E-Core) cores which promise 50 percent more processing power than the Lunar Lake processor series with the same battery efficiency.
The configuration of the most powerful processor model in this series will remain at 4 P-Core cores, 8 E-Core cores and 3 Low Power E-Core cores which were initially introduced in the previous Lunar Lake processor series.
Meanwhile, this processor series will also be combined with the Intel Arc Xe3 “Celestial” graphics chip which will also come with 12 physical cores which promise 50 percent more graphics processing power compared to the Xe2 “Battlemage”.
If AI processing power is also important to you, the Panther Lake chip series will use the fifth generation NPU chip, which offers up to 180 AI TOPS across the platform. The specific capabilities of the NPU chip have not been announced yet.
One advantage of the Panther Lake series of processors for laptop makers is that unlike Lunar Lake, this chip will no longer come with LPDDR5 memory built directly into the chip. This allows laptop makers to load the most optimal amount of memory into their offerings.
Our expectation is that laptop makers will still offer at least 16GB of LPDDR5/5X memory built into the chip, especially given the need for a laptop to take advantage of the latest AI technologies. Intel says that this series of processors can support memory speeds of up to 8533MT/s depending on the type of memory used.
As previously expected, Intel has confirmed that this Panther Lake processor will start shipping to laptop makers by the end of this year, and the introduction of the first laptops powered by this processor will be introduced early next year, possibly during the CES 2026 event in Las Vegas.