Intel unleashes Panther Lake CPUs, first built on 18A process

Company claims its Ultra Series 3 processors will offer the best battery life yet

Intel has finally let its new Panther Lake CPUs out of the cage. First detailed in October and now launching under the brand name Intel Core Ultra Series 3, these are the first chips made with Intel’s 18A process and boast improved power efficiency and performance, particularly for graphics and AI workloads.

Laptops with the chips will start shipping as soon as January 27, with Chipzilla boasting more than 200 design wins, including the new Dell XPS 14 and 16, which have just been announced and will be available for pre-order starting Tuesday, with a choice of Intel Core Ultra Series 3 configs. These laptops are all about long battery life, with Dell boasting in its press materials that they both lasted more than 40 hours while streaming 1080p video.

These new processors will also appear in devices other than laptops. Intel claims that they have been certified for embedded and industrial use in robotics, healthcare devices, and other kinds of edge computing hardware.

As part of its announcement, Intel revealed that there will be 14 SKUs of Core Ultra Series 3. These range from the 16-core, 5.1-GHz Core Ultra X9 388H on the high end to the 8-core, 4.4-GHz Core Ultra 5 322 on the low end.

All of the processors have either eight or 16 cores composed of three types of core. Each processor has four P or performance cores, which offer the highest clocks and use the most juice. Then there are LP E cores, which use the least amount of power and are the slowest. Then 16-core chips also have eight E cores which are somewhere in the middle. The goal is to offload as many tasks as possible onto the LP E and E cores to save power while lighting up the P cores for demanding tasks such as gaming.

Whatever cores it uses, Panther Lake’s new architecture promises power savings thanks to its die shrink from a 3 nm process to a 2 nm process, its use of denser RibbonFET transistors, and its shifting of power delivery to the back of the wafer.

The company claims that transistor density has increased by 30 percent while performance per watt is up 10 percent on single-threaded tasks and 50 percent on multithreaded tasks versus the prior-gen Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake CPUs. All of the SKUs carry a base power of 25 watts with turbo wattages of 65 or 55 W. Intel said that the top SKUs – the Core Ultra X9 and Core Ultra X7 – provide 60 percent better multithreaded performance and 77 percent faster gaming.

In another power-saving move, Core Ultra Series 3 processors will support Intel Intelligent Display technology, which uses AI to change screen settings based on what tasks you are performing and what you are doing. So, if you walk away, the screen instantly goes into a lower brightness and lower refresh rate than when you’re actively working. Similarly, if you are reading emails, it can lower the refresh rate and then raise it again when you’re watching videos or playing games. The lower your refresh rate and screen brightness, the less power your computer uses.

As we wrote about in October, not all of Panther Lake is made by Intel’s 18A process. The compute die, which contains the CPU and NPU, is made with 18A, but the platform controller is made by TSMC and the integrated GPU is either built by TSMC or Intel on its Intel 3 process, if it’s one of the lower-end models.

Speaking of graphics, Panther Lake comes with Intel Arc GPUs built in that each has up to 12 Xe cores for graphics and can deliver up to 120 TOPS (Trillion Operations per Second) when used for AI workloads. The GPUs enable Intel XeSS (super sampling) and XeSS-SR (Super Resolution), along with XeSS-MFG (multi-frame generation) and XeLL (low latency), all of which allow games to achieve faster frame rates through the power of AI upscaling and quicker response times.

Endurance Gaming Mode is designed to help improve battery life while gaming by lowering the frame rate at times. The Arc graphics also use XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) and XMX engines to help with their AI processing.

All of the Core Ultra Series 3 SKUs feature low-power NPUs that can achieve up to 50 TOPS themselves. The idea is that, where performance is key, the GPU will perform AI workloads, but where the task is simple enough, the NPU can do it while sipping a lot less juice.

Many of the chips have built-in support for Thunderbolt 5, which can provide 80 Gbps of bidirectional, wired connectivity and 120 Gbps in Bandwidth Boost mode. Others support only Thunderbolt 4, which is limited to 40 Gbps connections.

Either way, as long as the manufacturer puts a Thunderbolt port on the laptop, you can use the standard to connect to monitors and docks that provide video, data, and charging over a single cable. The laptops will also support Thunderbolt Share, which allows you to share screens, keyboard, mouse, and files over a single cable.

All of the chips support built-in Wi-Fi 7 with Bluetooth 6.0. Those are the latest wireless standards you can get.

The Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors support up to 96 or 128GB of LPDDR5x or DDR5 RAM, depending on SKU. The two X series chips, the Core Ultra X9 and Ultra X7, support RAM that operates at up to 9,600 MT/s, while other units support only up to 8,533, 7,467, or 6,800 MT/s. ®