Intel's contingency plan against Zen 6 is reportedly 24-core Panther Lake for desktop with up to double-digit IPC gain
Intel officially released the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200K CPUs for desktops on October 10. With new Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores, the Core Ultra 200K chips seem to have potential, especially since Intel claims a 9% IPC for the big and a 32% IPC gain for the small cores. However, as revealed by leaks, Arrow Lake CPUs bring little to no gains in gaming performance over the 14th-gen chips.
This is quite troubling for Intel if true, as, even when the Zen 5 chips aren’t as big of an upgrade as initially reported, the Ryzen 9000 CPUs do deliver some performance gains in gaming. AMD is also expected to release the first Ryzen 9000X3D chips soon and, if history is anything to go by, the Zen 5 X3D CPUs will outrun the vanilla Zen 5 parts in games.
Since the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 9 285K isn’t expected to beat the Core i9-14900K, a CPU that itself falls behind the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, there is little hope for Team Blue in gaming once the Ryzen 9000X3D chips launch.
The situation gets even worse when you consider that AMD is plans to release Zen 6 next year and Intel’s next CPU architecture, Nova Lake, isn’t expected to come out before 2026.
To address this gap, Intel has reportedly decided to bring Panther Lake to desktops.
Intel Panther Lake for desktops
The information comes to us via Moore’s Law Is Dead who claims that Intel is “considering launching an 8+16 Panther Lake compute tile to LGA1851 in 2025”. The proposed 8 Cougar Cove P-cores reportedly bring a 5-13% IPC uplift, while the Darkmont E-cores are said to make do with only a “minor IPC increase”.
Additionally, the leaker suggests that Panther Lake desktop chips will also be more efficient. Efficiency is the one thing that Arrow Lake has going for it, so Panther Lake potentially making progress in this department is an encouraging sign.
Finally, MLID reports that the desktop Panther Lake CPUs will feature the same SoC, I/O, and iGPU tiles as the Core Ultra 200K processors. Interestingly, the Arrow Lake chips allegedly use the same I/O die as Meteor Lake. So, Panther Lake would be packing a two-generation-old I/O die at that point.
It is important to mention here that MLID is hit or miss with his leaks. So, take the information presented with a giant grain of salt. This is especially true since one of the reasons for the release of Panther Lake on desktops is “ARL not being competitive with Zen 6”. As we don’t yet know how much better or worse the ARL chips perform vs Zen 5 parts, any final judgment as to the need for Panther Lake will have to wait.
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