In a flurry of tweets detailing Intel's upcoming processors, avid hardware leaker Jaykihn has shared specifications for Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake. Arriving in H2 this year, Panther Lake is the successor to Arrow Lake-H, which launched at this CES. Meanwhile, Wildcat Lake is rumored to power Intel's next-gen N-series chips, designed for lightweight laptops and mini-PCs.
Lunar Lake, crowned with the fastest integrated GPU per our testing, is a one-off design, as integrating memory directly into the CPU die has proven too costly for Intel to standardize. With no direct successor to Lunar Lake, Panther Lake follows Arrow Lake in less than one year, built using Intel's flagship 18A process technology.
Wildcat Lake has remained chiefly undercover, apart from a few design tools that surfaced at NBD. The same leaker claims it is designed for low-power and low-cost Chromebooks, mini-PCs, and embedded devices, and it succeeds the Alder Lake-N series.
There have been rumors of an 18-core counterpart of Panther Lake, though the exact specifications of these SKUs haven't been confirmed, per Jaykihn. Nonetheless, as reflected in the table below, the leaker has relayed details of three finalized Panther Lake variants. The top-end Panther Lake configuration boasts 16 CPU cores, likely based on Cougar Cove and Darkmont, alongside 12 Xe3 (Celestial) GPU cores. The second variant has fewer Xe3 cores but more PCIe 5.0 lanes, likely for a dedicated GPU. The third and last configuration features no E-cores, sticking to a 4P + 4LPE design.
Wildcat Lake seemingly only has one variation with six cores (2P + 4LPE), presumably using the exact Cougar Cove and Darkmont cores as Panther Lake. However, the Compute Tile will likely only house the two P-cores, while the LPE-cores are expected to reside in the SoC Tile. On the other hand, 40 AI TOPS could make for some fascinating use cases of these processors in edge and mobile machine learning applications.
Some SKUs may use LPCAMM, which offers fast and upgradable memory simultaneously. We don't have an expected release timeframe for Wildcat Lake, but early 2026 or even late 2025 may be potential candidates.
