The head of Intel unexpectedly showed the 1.8-nm Panther Lake processor

The CEO of Intel at the Lenovo Tech World exhibition unexpectedly showed a sample of the Panther Lake family of processors. These chips will be the company’s first consumer products manufactured using the advanced 18A process technology. The chip looks very different from the current Lunar Lake, which have built-in RAM.

Image source: youtube.com/@Lenovo

Panther Lake processors will have a chiplet layout based on Foveros technology – the chip will consist of five crystals. Future processors will receive the new Panther Cove P-cores and, probably, the current Skymont E-cores. It’s important to note that this is the first product to feature Xe3 graphics, albeit in a Low Power (LPG) variant. And this was unexpected, because Intel still has not even released discrete video cards based on Xe2.

«And one more thing, just one more thing before I leave the stage. You know, we worked together on Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake and Core Ultra PC, great battery life, CPU, GPU, NPU, but we’re not done yet, right? So, I’d like to give you our first sample of Panther Lake. This is our next 18A product coming out to complement the great work we announced today,” said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.

The company did not specify how much performance the Panther Lake chip’s CPU and GPU will have, but Gelsinger promised that the NPU (artificial intelligence accelerator) unit will be twice as fast as the unit in Lunar Lake (NPU4), which in turn is twice as fast. than in Meteor Lake (NPU3). In other words, the NPU5 AI accelerator in Panther Lake will be six times faster than the accelerator in Meteor Lake. According to unconfirmed reports, Intel has also canceled plans to release Arrow Lake Refresh chips, and the upcoming LGA 1851 socket will only support one generation of processors.