Tuesday, July 16th 2024
Intel Core Ultra 300 Series "Panther Lake" Leaks: 16 CPU Cores, 12 Xe3 GPU Cores, and Five-Tile Package
Intel is preparing to launch its next generation of mobile CPUs with Core Ultra 200 series "Lunar Lake" leading the charge. However, as these processors are about to hit the market, leakers reveal Intel's plans for the next-generation Core Ultra 300 series "Panther Lake". According to rumors, Panther Lake will double the core count of Lunar Lake, which capped out at eight cores. There are several configurations of Panther Lake in the making based on the different combinations of performance (P) "Cougar Cove," efficiency (E) "Skymont," and low power (LP) cores. First is the PTL-U with 4P+0E+4LP cores with four Xe3 "Celestial" GPU cores. This configuration is delivered within a 15 W envelope. Next, we have the PTL-H variant with 4P+8E+4LP cores for a total of 16 cores, with four Xe3 GPU cores, inside a 25 W package. Last but not least, Intel will also make PTL-P SKUs with 4P+8E+4LP cores, with 12 Xe3 cores, to create a potentially decent gaming chip with 25 W of power.
Intel's Panther Lake CPU architecture uses an innovative design approach, utilizing a multi-tile configuration. The processor incorporates five distinct tiles, with three playing active roles in its functionality. The central compute operations are handled by one "Die 4" tile with CPU and NPU, while "Die 1" is dedicated to platform control (PCD). Graphics processing is managed by "Die 5", leveraging Intel's Xe3 technology. Interestingly, two of the five tiles serve a primarily structural purpose. These passive elements are strategically placed to achieve a balanced, rectangular form factor for the chip. This design philosophy echoes a similar strategy employed in Intel's Lunar Lake processors. Panther Lake is poised to offer greater versatility compared to its Lunar Lake counterpart. It's expected to cater to a wider range of market segments and use cases. One notable advancement is the potential for increased memory capacity compared to Lunar Lake, which capped out at 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory running at 8533 MT/s. We can expect to hear more potentially at Intel's upcoming Innovation event in September, while general availability of Panther Lake is expected in late 2025 or early 2026.
Sources:
@Jaykihn (on X), via VideoCardz
Intel's Panther Lake CPU architecture uses an innovative design approach, utilizing a multi-tile configuration. The processor incorporates five distinct tiles, with three playing active roles in its functionality. The central compute operations are handled by one "Die 4" tile with CPU and NPU, while "Die 1" is dedicated to platform control (PCD). Graphics processing is managed by "Die 5", leveraging Intel's Xe3 technology. Interestingly, two of the five tiles serve a primarily structural purpose. These passive elements are strategically placed to achieve a balanced, rectangular form factor for the chip. This design philosophy echoes a similar strategy employed in Intel's Lunar Lake processors. Panther Lake is poised to offer greater versatility compared to its Lunar Lake counterpart. It's expected to cater to a wider range of market segments and use cases. One notable advancement is the potential for increased memory capacity compared to Lunar Lake, which capped out at 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory running at 8533 MT/s. We can expect to hear more potentially at Intel's upcoming Innovation event in September, while general availability of Panther Lake is expected in late 2025 or early 2026.
18 Comments on Intel Core Ultra 300 Series "Panther Lake" Leaks: 16 CPU Cores, 12 Xe3 GPU Cores, and Five-Tile Package
A newer TPU article has a slide with more exact info: Support for 16b x4 channels. In comparison, Apple too has 16-bit LPDDR non-X controllers on the M3 series (eight of them on the plain M3). That's why I think it's 64 bits total. Not even 80 because ECC is unlikely in this segment.
As for Apple, they don't actually sell all kind of configurations. A M3 Mackbook pro can be configured to be 8GB, 16GB or 24GB, for you to get more than that, you need at least a M3 Pro which caps at 36GB, and for those who want even beyond that, they need to get a M3 Max.
Lunar Lake isn't there to compete with M3 Max and similar chips, by the time you need that much memory you would probably be more disgruntled towards the 4P+0E+4LPE cores.
The next E cores are on their way to completely make the P core design obsolete in about 2 years.And they can put two of them for 128-bits, just like every CPU generation since Pentium 4 went dual channel in 2003. LPDDR having subdivisions confuse people endlessly, but Intel laptops have been using them for a decade now and has always been 128-bits. Whether you call 1x128 or 2x64 or 128x1 it doesn't matter, because in the end it's always 128-bits.
Those E cores aren't that little cores like we think of A53s, A55 or similar, they are still huge cores and are really only little when compared to the massive cove or zen cores.
To put it into perspective, a Skymont core has about the same vector throughput as Zen 2/3/4(i.e. 4x128b vectors per cycle vs 2x256b vectors per cycle).
Each skymont core can pull off 64B/cycle from L2 and the L2 can service in total 128B/cycle. Which is better than Gracemont as that was 64B/cycle in Gracemont and would help a lot with resource contention. It's still ofc not as good as a four different cores which each has their individual L2 and the bandwidth is entirely theirs.
It can also help that they now have L1 to L1 transfers from the same cluster, without needing to go into L3. This could help when you have a cluster working into a workload that shares a lot of modified data between threads.
I think the raptor cove big cores have like 3MB L2? and the GRT cores in Raptor Lake have 4MB (same for arrow lake it sounds like), so a single thread from arrow lake would have a 4MB L2 to potentially access. And if Intel were to pursue e-cores as a main microarchitecture, they could always beef up the L2 cache even further to give them more punch.I don't think they're doing it more often than they need to. Intel this year has Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake. AMD this year has Ryzen AI (their Lunar Lake counterpart) and their Ryzen desktop parts (which do seem to differ as they don't have the Ryzen AI NPU). AMD also has Ryzen 5x3D coming whenever. Intel next year has Panther Lake. AMD might have nothing, or they might have the 5x3D depending on when it comes out. Personally, if Panther Lake is a new microarchitecture, I'd take that over nothing.