According to Tom's Hardware the commit confirms Panther Lake will wield Cougar Cove Performance cores and Darkmont Efficiency cores, which likely include Low Power Efficiency cores too. Panther Lake is expected to muscle into the market late 2025, replacing the current Arrow Lake U and H offerings.
With Chipzilla’s flagship 18A process already in risk production, Panther Lake is on track for mass production later this year. If history repeats, most of the lineup will flood shelves by early 2026, following the sluggish roll-out pattern of Meteor Lake.
Panther Lake is not a direct successor to Lunar Lake, a one-off exercise in on-package memory and power sipping, despite what some wide-eyed pundits might suggest. Current chatter points to Panther Lake chips carrying up to 18 hybrid cores (6P+8E+4LPE) and 12 Xe cores based on the Celestial (Xe3) graphics architecture.
Chipzilla claims Panther Lake will blend Arrow Lake’s power with Lunar Lake’s efficiency, which is as woolly a marketing claim as they come. Leaks hint at Panther Lake laptops mostly sticking to SODIMM or soldered memory, although some flashier units might sport next-gen LPCAMM modules for speedier, upgradeable RAM.
Rumoured TDPs running up to 64W mean Panther Lake silicon could find itself lodged inside everything from entry-level laptops to gaming gear and even the dashboards of autonomous motors.
An Intel engineer pushed an update to perfmon’s lookup tables, slotting Panther Lake under “GenuineIntel-6-CC”, tying it to CPU Family 6, Model 204 (0xCC). The patch also name-checks Cougar Cove and Darkmont cores as the muscle and mileage behind Panther Lake’s punch.
Chipzilla’s rumoured P-core roadmap has been sketched as Lion Cove (Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake) to Cougar Cove (Panther Lake, Clearwater Forest) and then Coyote Cove (Nova Lake). Meanwhile, the E-cores stumble from Skymont to Darkmont and later to Arctic Wolf. As usual with leaks, seasoning with industrial quantities of salt is advised.
If this all holds water, Panther Lake marks a full leap in architecture and a proper node shrink, which should mean serious performance gains. How much they will cost compared to TSMC-built Lunar Lake laptops is anyone’s guess — but with Computex looming, Chipzilla may finally show its hand.
