Intel Panther Lake “PTL-U” Mobility CPU Test Tools Spotted, BGA2540 Form Factor

Intel is prepping up for its next-generation Panther Lake CPUs as test tools for the PTL-U chips have been spotted on the official webpage.

The Panther Lake CPUs will be the first major client product launch on the next-gen 18A process node. Intel recently announced that Panther Lake will be heading to fabs shortly so early silicon is yet to come back but Intel is laying the groundwork for when the time comes. The company has already readied test tools for the PTL-U family of Panther Lake-U which will be the low-power CPU family aimed at mobile platforms such as laptops. The interesting thing is that the test tool for the CPUs suggests a BGA 2540 form factor which could be representative of the early RVP (Reference Evaluation Platforms).

As far as the specifications are concerned, Intel's Panther Lake CPUs are expected to hit both PC desktop and laptop platforms. The compute tile will be composed of the next-generation Cougar Cove P-Core and Skymont E-Core architecture. The GPU tile will be composed of the Arc Celestial "Xe3" iGPUs and Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, already highlighted a further 2x speedup in the AI NPU performance over Lunar Lake.

Intel Panther Lake CPUs Expected Features:

The Panther Lake CPUs are likely to compete against AMD's Zen 5 refreshes in the form of the X3D products on the desktop front and tuned mobile variants for laptops. The lineup is also expected to retain support on the LGA 1851 socket which will support both Meteor Lake-PS and Arrow Lake-S CPUs in 2024.

It will be interesting to see how the core configurations progress with Panther Lake as Intel is expected to remove SMT in favor of its hybrid architecture, utilizing both P-Core & E-Core architectures on the client side while segmenting them into Xeon 6E and Xeon 6P for the servers.

News Source: @harukaze5719