At Computex 2025 in Taipei, Intel unveiled its upcoming Panther Lake processors—the successors to Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake—under the Intel Core Ultra 300 series, slated to reach PCs in early 2026. Built on Intel’s pivotal 18A process, Panther Lake promises both performance and efficiency gains.
Per Wccftech, Panther Lake will match Lunar Lake’s power efficiency while incorporating the high-performance traits of the Arrow Lake H-series. In effect, Intel has blended Arrow Lake’s speed with Lunar Lake’s low-power design to create this new chipset.
During the demo, Intel showcased a Panther Lake system with a 16-core CPU configuration—4 performance (P) cores, 8 efficiency (E) cores, and 4 low-power (LP) cores—likely based on Cougar Cove, Darkmont, and potentially Skymont microarchitectures. Graphics duties were handled by a prototype Xe3 (“Celestial”) GPU.
The engineering sample ran at a base clock of 2.0 GHz with boost speeds up to 3.0 GHz; final retail models are expected to run even faster. This demonstration not only highlights the readiness of Intel’s 18A node for mass production but also sets the stage for a showdown between x86 Panther Lake and Arm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite, whose third-generation Oryon CPU aims to deliver major performance and efficiency advances.
