Intel's very own "Halo" CPU for enthusiast laptops is likely going to arrive with the Panther Lake family as the Arrow Lake plan has been disbanded.
Intel & AMD To Have Enthusiast "Halo" Products But Red Team To Take The Lead First, Most Likely Arriving With Panther Lake
The information comes from Lenovo China's product manager who has some more insights on the upcoming Halo products from Intel and AMD. Just yesterday, we reported the reemergence of early engineering samples of the Arrow Lake Halo CPUs which would feature bigger iGPUs and dedicated cache in the form of Adamantine. These CPUs were reported two years back but since then, they've not seen that much traction.
There were reports that the Halo lineup might've been canceled, and that's most likely the case but don't worry as Intel is still actively approaching the Halo formula and it will probably arrive with a future generation of CPUs. According to the source, there are plans for a chip similar to Arrow Lake Halo but they won't be arriving as early as previously expected. The Arrow Lake Halo silicon is now pretty much a dead end and only remnants of the product remain along with its RVP or Reference Evaluation Platform.
It is further mentioned that Intel's Arrow Lake Halo's iGPU tile might be used by future Panther Lake products which are expected to launch next year. Panther Lake will be the follow-up to the Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake lineup and is expected to arrive later next year. This chip will feature new core architectures such as Cougar Cove P-Cores and Xe3 "Celestial" graphics architecture, a follow-up to Xe2 "Battlemage".
Intel's Arrow Lake Halo CPUs were designed to incorporate 320 Execution units leading to a huge integrated graphics tile and a variant of Panther Lake is said to implement a similar tile but on the new architecture. It will be interesting to see how things pan out but it looks like Intel might have missed the race to Halo chips against AMD despite them starting the development work early on.
Roadblocks such as the delayed Meteor Lake and Arc GPU launches came in the way which might have been a cause behind the push back but we can hope that Intel will have an answer to AMD soon as the company is going to launch its Strix Halo CPUs next year with up to 16 Zen 5 cores, up to 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units and a chiplet-esque design with up to 130W TDPs which will put a lot of pressure, not only on Intel but the entry-level discrete graphics segment too.
Intel & AMD Halo CPUs (Preliminary)
| CPU Name | Arrow Lake Halo | Panther Lake Halo | Strix Halo |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU Company | Intel | Intel | AMD |
| CPU Architecture | Lion Cove + Skymont | Cougar Cove + Next E | Zen 5 |
| GPU Architecture | Xe-LPG (Alchemist) | Xe3-LPG (Celestial) | RDNA 3.5 |
| CPU Cores (Max) | 6+8 (14/20) | TBD | 16 |
| GPU Cores (Max) | 20 Xe-Cores | 20 Xe2 Cores | 40 Compute Units |
| L4 Cache | Adamantine (TBD) | Adamantine (TBD) | Infinity Cache (32 MB) |
| Memory Support | TBD | TBD | LPDDR5X-8533 |
| TDP | TBD | TBD | 55-130W |
| Launch | Cancelled | 2025? | 2025? |
News Source: Videocardz
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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