Credit: Intel

Intel will formally launch its first Core Ultra Series 3 laptop processors later this month, the company announced at its CES keynote today. Codenamed Panther Lake and targeted, at least for now, at high-end ultraportable PCs, the Core Ultra 3 chips will also be the first to use Intel’s 18A manufacturing process, the company’s effort to catch up with the chip manufacturing technology of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC).

The launch will start with 14 chips across 5 product families, which Intel says will be used in “over 200” PC designs. The first of these will be available on January 27th, with others following “throughout the first half of this year.”

• The Core Ultra X9 and Core Ultra X7 processors include all of Intel’s latest CPU and GPU architectures, plus a fully-enabled 12-core Intel Arc B390 integrated GPU and support for slightly faster LPDDR5x-9600.
• The Core Ultra 9 and 7 processors will use all of the same technologies, but with just four GPU cores and support for either LPDDR5x-8533 or DDR5-7200 DIMMs. But they will offer 20 PCI Express lanes, up from 12 for the X9 and X7, meaning they’ll pair better with dedicated GPUs.
• The Core Ultra 5 chips are mostly lower-end models with fewer CPU cores, and either 4- or 2-core GPUs. But Intel being Intel, there is one oddball that muddies the waters: the Core Ultra 5 338H, which has 12 CPU cores and a 10-core Intel Arc B370 GPU.

A Panther Lake refresher

We wrote about the basic building blocks of Panther Lake when Intel released details late last year. In many ways the chip is a retreat from the Lunar Lake design, sold as Core Ultra 200V, which used chiplets manufactured mostly outside the company and on-package RAM rather than memory in a DIMM slot or soldered to the mainboard. At the time, Intel said these moves were made in the interest of saving power and extending battery life, as were decisions like removing Hyperthreading support from the P-cores.

The Core Ultra 3 chips pull back on some of these changes, but Intel did say it had used Lunar Lake as its baseline for power efficiency, hopefully ensuring that its improvements won’t come at the expense of battery life.

Like past Core Ultra generations, the Core Ultra 3 chips use a chiplet-based approach, combining several distinct silicon tiles on a foundational “base tile” using Intel’s Foveros packaging technology. The compute tile houses the CPU cores and the neural processing unit (NPU), and it’s the piece that’s built using 18A—there are two version of this tile, one with a maximum of 16 CPU cores and one with 8. The platform controller tile, which handles most I/O, is still being built at TSMC, as is the high-end 12-core version of the graphics tile. A simpler four-core version of the graphics tile is being made using an older Intel 3 process, which to date has mostly been used for Intel’s Xeon server CPUs.

The chiplet-based approach allows Intel to mix-and-match these tiles to offer three distinct iterations of Panther Lake: the 16-core CPU and the 12-core GPU, the 16-core CPU and the 4-core GPU, and the 8-core CPU and the 4-core GPU. Versions of these chips with some CPU and GPU cores switched off fill out the rest of the Core Ultra Series 3 lineup.

Intel is making big performance claims about the highest-end Core Ultra Series 3 processors: up to 60 percent faster multi-core CPU performance compared to the outgoing Core Ultra 200V chips, and up to 77 percent faster integrated GPU performance. Intel also says a “Lenovo IdeaPad reference design” using a Core Ultra X9 388H was able to stream Netflix at 1080p for 27.1 hours, though how battery life shakes out in real-world laptops is going to vary widely based on other specs and settings.

All Panther Lake chips will also include the same neural processing unit (NPU), capable of up to 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This puts it well above the 40 TOPS requirement for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC label, if a bit short of the 60 TOPS that AMD is claiming for its Ryzen AI 400 series and the 80 TOPS that Qualcomm says its Snapdragon X2 chips are capable of. Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, and up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports round out the most important connectivity features.

It remains to be seen whether Core Ultra Series 3 chips are a turning point for Intel’s fortunes or a temporary rebound in between years of missed deadlines (Panther Lake is a month later than Intel said it would be in October, though by its recent standards that isn’t bad). But their launch later this month suggests that the company’s 18A facilities are up and running, opening the door to the kind of third-party chip manufacturing that former CEO Pat Gelsinger began pursuing nearly five years ago.