Intel’s Panther Cove – possibly for Core Ultra 400 CPUs – could deliver a big performance boost and give AMD engineers some sleepless nights

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Watch out, AMD – Intel’s future CPUs built on Panther Cove might be a huge leap forward in performance.

A future Intel architecture for its performance cores – the hefty cores that do most of the grunt work, as opposed to smaller efficiency cores in its hybrid CPUs – is expected to be a big leap forward for IPC, according to a new rumor.

This is the Panther Cove architecture – not to be confused with Panther Lake (we’ll come back to that shortly) – and it’s seemingly going to forge ahead in a major way with IPC. IPC stands for Instructions Per Clock, meaning that processors built with this future architecture will be able to get tasks done faster (literally processing more instructions every clock cycle).

As Tom’s Hardware reports, leaker InstLatX64 on X brought our attention to Panther Cove getting this boost, as per a post on the Real World Technologies forum (add seasoning).

That post observes that: “Panther Cove is big uarch (sic) change with large IPC [boost] and APX/AVX10 and more.”

Where does Panther Cove fit in with Intel’s CPU roadmap? Well, here’s where it gets slightly complicated, as you might think it’s for Panther Lake processors, right?

Nope, wrong. True, it seems a logical enough conclusion, bearing in mind that Panther Cove is an architecture – the nuts and bolts of the tech that makes a CPU core, a performance core in this case – and Panther Lake is a family of processors (built on a given architecture, or actually two architectures, as the efficiency cores have a different one – but let’s not complicate things any further than necessary, this leak is about performance cores).

However, despite the naming commonality, the two don’t go together, and in actual fact, Panther Lake CPUs will use the Cougar Cove architecture (processor families are ‘Lakes’ and architectures are ‘Coves’ it should be noted). If the rumors are right, that is – some of this leaked info may prove incorrect, as always.

(Image credit: Intel)

Analysis: Cougars and Panthers and Coyotes, oh my brain hurts

So, the theory as it stands is that Intel’s next-gen Arrow Lake desktop processors, which are imminent, will use Lion Cove for their performance cores, and then we’ll have Panther Lake – laptop CPUs only, arriving in 2025 – with Cougar Cove.

After that, we’ll see the generation with Panther Cove, which in theory would be the Nova Lake family (the next desktop chips for Intel after Arrow Lake, going by the grapevine – the purported Arrow Lake Refresh has been canceled). That said, the caveat here is that elsewhere on the rumor mill, others are saying Nova Lake performance cores will be built on Coyote Cove, another name that has only recently come onto the scene, adding to the confusion.

All of this underlines how tricky it can be to digest rumors on hardware that’s a long way down the line, and how Intel’s naming scheme for CPUs and their architectures is confusing (not matching Panther Lake and Cove just seems a bit daft, and is presumably a result of development timings going awry at some point).

However, the apparent message is clear – we’re due a big jump in performance with Arrow Lake, a more modest one with Panther Lake, and then a large leap again, as noted with IPC, in the family using Panther Cove (maybe Nova Lake – maybe not). Whatever the case, large gains are in the pipeline for the architecture that follows Arrow and Panther Lake, quite possibly the Core Ultra 400 chips – if this rumor is right.

The mentioned APX support – which stands for Advanced Performance Extensions – will also help speed up apps, and could have a pretty wide impact, depending on how much developers leverage it. This is more likely to be for apps than games, but that said, the major game engines could take advantage of APX (fingers crossed) for further gains.

Intel’s CPU future seems a bit brighter then, adding skepticism appropriately, and things are already looking up on the laptop front with Lunar Lake, mobile chips that have just arrived and have impressed already.

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