When we're treated to the annual deluge of laptop announcements at CES in January, chances are Intel's Panther Lake processors will be inside a lot of them. They'll probably show up in the top-end thin-and-light models, which tend to have the most cutting-edge integrated graphics and best NPU performance.
Panther Lake debuts Intel's 18A 2nm fab process in its consumer chips, and a switch to a smaller process generally results in performance gains and new, denser chip layouts. Basically, we should see an increase in power and power efficiency. For comparison, the Apple M4 and upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite are 3nm and AMD's Zen 5 is 4nm.
The 18A process also introduces a new transistor architecture, dubbed RibbonFET, which lays the groundwork for future generations of chips.
I find it interesting that Panther Lake has scaled up its AI performance not via the neural processing unit, which all the CPU makers have been hyping as the most efficient way to implement it, but via the GPU. (GPUs have always delivered better performance for AI-heavy calculations, they just use a lot of power for it.) Intel's new NPU 5 only bumps performance from a maximum of 48 trillion operations per second to 50 TOPS. That's a lot less than the Qualcomm, which goes up to 80. It does add support for FP8, a data type that's become common for having low overhead but better performance than its integer predecessor.
Instead, the new Xe 3 graphics architecture in Panther Lake (for its third-generation Arc graphics) adds more, optimized cores (up to 6 per render slice compared to 4 on Xe 2), resulting in a boost from 67 TOPS in Xe 2 to up to 120 TOPS with Xe 3. For gaming, Intel claims the new Arc graphics is a lot faster than Lunar Lake's Xe 2-based Arc generation for a given power draw. Play longer, faster: the Holy Grail.
Another notable update is with the image processing used by webcams. Intel's added support for "staggered" HDR acceleration -- a retronym for the original method of expanding a photo's tonal range by algorithmically combining bright and dark exposures. There's also improved noise processing. Overall, it means that photos and videos should have better low-light quality.
There will be a few variations of Panther Lake chip configurations: up 8- or 16-core versions with up to 4-core GPUs and an up to 16-core 12Xe with a 12-core GPU. They all support faster memory (albeit at different speeds) as well as Wi-Fi 7 (R2) and Bluetooth Core 6.