Intel unveils Panther Lake iGPU with lofty performance gains over Lunar Lake
Intel has revealed more details about the Xe3 iGPU found on Panther Lake CPUs. Its gaming performance uplift is minimal, but as we've seen with previous generations, it always improves with subsequent driver updates. This time, Intel offers its unspecified Arc iGPUs in two flavours: one with 4 EUs and the other with 12 EUs. That said, an earlier leak stated at least one SKU exists with 10 EUs, so there's a good chance it has two units disabled for stability.
By default, a Panther Lake iGPU starts at 4 EUs, but can be scaled to 6 EUs if needed. The above-mentioned 10 EU SKU might be using a combination of them both. Each 4 EU slice comes with 4 Xe3 cores, four raytracing units, 32 XMX engines, 4 MB cache, one geometry pipeline and four samplers.
On the performance front, Intel has made some lofty claims about Panther Lake's iGPU performance. It claims to offer up to a 50% performance increase over Lunar Lake and a 40% increased performance per-watt. As always, these are first-party benchmarks and should be treated with scepticism until more data emerges.
Intel has also confirmed its next generation of iGPUs will launch under the Xe3P umbrella, and not Xe4, which was supposed to be its Druid architecture. It isn't clear if Druid has been scrapped, but if it hasn't, it isn't launching anytime soon.
Source(s)
Intel
