Intel officially took the wraps off Panther Lake two weeks ago, and even though we already did our deep dive into the family's architecture, something far more arbitrary has still not been cleared up — the naming scheme. Last week, HWMonitor got updated to add support for Panther Lake, from where we learned the purported models that make up the lineup. Now, we have fresh news, courtesy of a new Geekbench listing, that somewhat refutes part of that, potentially clearing the air for Panther Lake's confusing naming scheme once and for all.
The 39,406 score in the actual Geekbench listing is not that impressive when you consider the architectural leap, the node improvements, and the fact that two extra cores only yield a roughly 4% higher score than last-gen's competing Lunar Lake GPU — the Arc A140T, which scores 37,953 points on average. Still, the performance is in line with AMD's Radeon 880M iGPU, which is found in the company's Strix Point APU lineup and is listed at around 39,917 in Geekbench. Overall, Panther Lake's integrated graphics seem to be solid.
In the original announcement, Intel only vaguely mentioned the SKUs we can expect from this generation, divided into three categories: a low-power 8-core tier, a high-power 16-core tier, and another high-power 16-core tier with fully spec'd out integrated graphics. That last tier is what pre-launch leaks already told us about: a new "X" designation for flagship processors with 12 Xe3 GPU cores. Though there was some confusion about whether the branding would extend to Core Ultra 5, since it only has 10 Xe3 cores.
Originally, we thought it was just one Core Ultra 9 and two Core Ultra 7 SKUs, but the HWMonitor update explicitly bundled in one Core Ultra 5 by calling it "Core Ultra X5 388H," which today's Geekbench listing contradicts, bringing us full circle to the original leak where it was never part of the X club anyways. All of this to say, we're pretty confident now that only three top-end Panther Lake SKUs will carry the X branding and feature 12 Xe3 GPU cores, while the Core Ultra 5 338H will still remain part of this upper tier (since it uses a cut-down version of the same tile), but just without an X.
We've plotted out a table for you below to make it easier to understand Panther Lake models, but keep in mind that this is still speculative since laptops with these processors haven't been released yet.
SKU | P-Cores (Cougar Cove) | E-Cores (Darkmont) | LP-E Cores (Skymont) | Xe3 GPU Cores |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Panther Lake-H 12 Xe | Row 0 - Cell 1 | Row 0 - Cell 2 | Row 0 - Cell 3 | Row 0 - Cell 4 |
Core Ultra X9 388H | 4 | 8 | 4 | 12 |
Core Ultra X7 368H | 4 | 8 | 4 | 12 |
Core Ultra X7 358H | 4 | 8 | 4 | 12 |
Core Ultra 5 338H | 4 | 4 | 4 | 10 |
Panther Lake-H | Row 5 - Cell 1 | Row 5 - Cell 2 | Row 5 - Cell 3 | Row 5 - Cell 4 |
Core Ultra 9 375H | 4 | 8 | 4 | 4 |
Core Ultra 7 355H | 4 | 8 | 4 | 4 |
Core Ultra 7 345H | 4 | 8 | 4 | 4 |
Core Ultra 5 325H | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
Panther Lake-U | Row 10 - Cell 1 | Row 10 - Cell 2 | Row 10 - Cell 3 | Row 10 - Cell 4 |
Core Ultra 7 360U | 4 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
Core Ultra 5 350U | 4 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
Core Ultra 5 340U | 4 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
Core Ultra 3 320U | 2 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
*figures in table are not confirmed.
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