In addition to announcing Clearwater Forest as Xeon 6+, Intel also used their Tech Tour 2025 Arizona event for predominantly focusing on upcoming Panther Lake SoCs for laptops shipping in 2026.
The Intel Tech Tour event didn’t feature any Panther Lake SKU tables, no detailed benchmarks, and other information lacking but rather a current overview of this successor to Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. Intel Panther Lake is still expected to ship in H1’2026. Review sampling it sounds like will begin after CES.
Intel Panther Lake will support LPDDR5-9600 and DDR5-7200 memory — but that maximum speed will vary based upon the SKU. Going for DDR5-7500 memory allows up to a 128GB max memory capacity compared to 96GB with LPDDR5 memory — much better in any case than Lunar Lake tapping out at 32GB.
There are going to be three main variants of Panther Lake with an 8-core model, 16-core model, and a 16-core flagship model with 12 Xe graphics cores. Though with that 16-core 12Xe model is 12 PCIe lanes compared to 20 PCIe lanes with the 16-core version featuring just 4 Xe cores. All three versions use the Xe3 graphics architecture, up to four Thunderbolt 4 connections and WiFi 7. All models also feature the Intel NPU Gen5 (NPU 5) neural processing unit.
The 8-core Panther Lake tops out at LPDDR5x-6800 and DDR5-6400, the 16-core Panther Lake at LPDDR5x-8533 or DDR5-7200, and the 16-core 12Xe model at the full LPDDR5x-9600 speed.
The 8-core Panther Lake is made up of four P cores (Cougar Cove) and four LP E-cores (Darkmont). Meanwhile the 16-core versions use four P-cores and then 8 Darkmont E-cores and four Darkmont LP E-cores.
The performance should be much better with Panther Lake compared to Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake. No Linux benchmark numbers yet… Once we actually get our hands on Panther Lake hardware we will be able to put it through its rigorous paces under Linux.
