Intel Panther Lake “Core Ultra 300” CPUs to Pack Next-Gen NPU5 Architecture, Brings Improved AI Performance and Capabilities

Neural Processing Units (NPU) have taken the AI world by storm due to their incorporation within processors such as Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs.

Team Blue enabled edge AI on all compatible devices by bringing huge AI processing power on board via processors in this tile. Intel is currently planning to take things forward. According to Phoronix, Team Blue’s “Panther Lake” SoCs will incorporate new 5th Generation NPUs, or NPU5.

Interestingly, the patches don’t say much about the performance we can expect from 5th-generation NPUs. Still, they say that early “NPU5” support will require a few lines of code because the driver code paths are similar to what previous-generation NPUs arrived with. The current generation of Intel NPUs has dramatically differing performance, with Meteor Lake’s NPU3 delivering 11.5 TOPs and Lunar Lake’s NPU4 offering 48 TOPs of peak AI computation.

Given the tremendous generation advances in NPU3 and NPU4, Intel is predicted to deliver big with Panther Lake and its AI capabilities, especially now that the “AI PC” hype has become popular and critical for CPU manufacturers.

For a quick review of Panther Lake, the “Core Ultra 300” SKUs will feature Cougar Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores. Xe3, also known as Celestial and the replacement for Battlemage, is the third significant Xe architecture update that will probably be available for the onboard GPU. Based on earlier rumours, here’s what Panther Lake’s probable SoCs would look like:

PTL-H SKU #1: 4 P-Cores + 8 E-Cores + 0 LP-E Cores + 4 Xe3 Cores (45W)
PTL-H SKU #2: 4 P-Cores + 8 E-Cores + 4 LP-E Cores + 12 Xe3 Cores (25W)
PTL-H SKU #3: 4 P-Cores + 8 E-Cores + 4 LP-E Cores + 4 Xe3 Cores (25W)
PTL-U SKU #1: 4 P-Cores + 0 E-Cores + 4 LP-E Cores + 4 Xe3 Cores (15W)