Discussion Intel Nova Lake in H2-2026: Discussion Threads

Page 58 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

mikk

Diamond Member
May 15, 2012
4,332
2,413
136
It requires a big uArch improvement without faster memory, same GPU cache size and same amount of shader units. With Razor Lake they could add more Xe3p units if it has LPDDR6 support.
 

DavidC1

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2023
2,123
3,254
106
Pantherlake has essentially minimal memory increases too. 13% is nothing. It will probably be 5% in average. But Xe3 makes caches and memory bandwidth efficient.

N2 is even worse. They could have got something like 16 Xe cores and got another big gain. I would hope the 12 Xe core version is 50% faster then.

@regen1 It's only good in a vacuum. The competitor is RDNA5. Canis shows that RDNA5 is a substantial improvement that'll likely make Xe3P irrelevant, hence my claim it'll be like PTL vs Strix but flipped with AMD having 50%+ advantage.
Both Intel and AMD could be winners if they can take the market from at least the low to mid dGPUs and actually be able to gain full revenue from nVidia.
This is only true if they can charge much as Nvidia would have. I don't think people will like that very much. 5 series laptops are going to be $1500 at the rate we're going.
 
Last edited:

ToTTenTranz

Senior member
Feb 4, 2021
911
1,522
136
We have Canis coming 2 years later with "15W being similar to 30W"

I think people are taking @Kepler_L2 's comment a bit too literally.

Canis is a 15W TDP with a gaming performance that probably matches Panther Lake when its TDP is set to 30W.

This does not mean that Canis at 15W performs 2x faster than Panther Lake if the latter is also set to 15W. We don't know if PTL-H gains any substantial amount of gaming performance above 22W. Strix Point's gains above 22W in gaming are almost negligible, for example..


It could be that Canis' gaming performance is only ~50% faster than PTL-H when both are set to 15W. And on Canis' side that comes with a bunch of caveats that would make it inadequate to compete against PTL-H in every other PC use case: lower single-threaded CPU performance due to dense cores at lower clocks, much lower thread count that would hurt multitasking PC use, not enough PHYs and I/O for a bunch of TB4/USB4 ports, fewer display outputs, lack of dedicated high performance video codecs for 4K60 streaming, etc.

15W Canis (full focus on gaming) being similar to 30W PTL-H (general purpose chip) doesn't mean Intel couldn't design a gaming-focused monolithic N3P/18A chip with e.g. 192bit L5X, 16 Xe3, 4P + 4E cores, no NPU, etc. that would perform a lot closer to Canis at 15W in gaming FPS / frametimes.
 

mikk

Diamond Member
May 15, 2012
4,332
2,413
136
PTL Xe3 came with 50% more units and a doubled GPU cache. Even with a larger uarch improvment on Xe3p it is not getting the same performance improvement.

ToTTenTranz, PTL 12Xe3 will gain a lot from 22W to 45W or 65W. Even Lunar Lake with much lower max iGPU clock speeds is gaining quite a bit with 30 or 37W. I think the CPU cores are too power hungry for iGPU gaming. In the early CES PTL previews on a ~60W device the budget sharing was roughly 50% for both CPU and iGPU. Maybe Intel could improve the power management over time.
 

ToTTenTranz

Senior member
Feb 4, 2021
911
1,522
136
ToTTenTranz, PTL 12Xe3 will gain a lot from 22W to 45W or 65W.

I really doubt this, especially within the 45-65W range (unlike Halo). At some point the gains are bottlenecked by RAM bandwidth, so the iGPU and CPU get high clocks and consume a lot of power but they're mostly stalling for the data to come. It doesn't have a 256bit bus nor 32MB IC like Halo.

Regardless, ThePhawx seems to have some unit in his hands and he's been making a battery of tests on Panther Lake H. We should be getting news about this within the next few days.
 

mikk

Diamond Member
May 15, 2012
4,332
2,413
136
I really doubt this, especially within the 45-65W range (unlike Halo). At some point the gains are bottlenecked by RAM bandwidth, so the iGPU and CPU get high clocks and consume a lot of power but they're mostly stalling for the data to come. It doesn't have a 256bit bus nor 32MB IC like Halo.

Regardless, ThePhawx seems to have some unit in his hands and he's been making a battery of tests on Panther Lake H. We should be getting news about this within the next few days.


35W is much faster than 20W:
 

DavidC1

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2023
2,123
3,254
106
I really doubt this, especially within the 45-65W range (unlike Halo). At some point the gains are bottlenecked by RAM bandwidth, so the iGPU and CPU get high clocks and consume a lot of power but they're mostly stalling for the data to come. It doesn't have a 256bit bus nor 32MB IC like Halo.
It's not bad as Strix Halo, but it's a measurable amount. The advantage compared to Lunarlake 30W is 70-80%, and that's with PTL set at 65W. At similar power it's about ~1.5x. Meaning there's likely about 20% difference between 35W and 65W.

And we know from the Xe3 scaling graph(where it says >1.5x against Lunar) the performance is noticeably lower on lower power envelopes. Yes, the numbers aren't plotted on the graph, but we can approximate, because where Lunarlake scaling ends is likely in the ~35W range. All in all 22W to 65W is probably 35-45% difference in performance.

Pantherlake doesn't have the fancy "Infinity Cache" naming but it essentially has it's own version. 16MB for GPU for 12 Xe cores is basically 16MB IC.
Canis is a 15W TDP with a gaming performance that probably matches Panther Lake when its TDP is set to 30W.

This does not mean that Canis at 15W performs 2x faster than Panther Lake if the latter is also set to 15W. We don't know if PTL-H gains any substantial amount of gaming performance above 22W. Strix Point's gains above 22W in gaming are almost negligible, for example..
I'm not saying RDNA5 will be 2x better. It's probably going to be ~1.6x, which is not a small amount. Xe3P will likely lose, unless it gets another substantial uarch advantage, made worse by the fact that Xe3P has no Xe3 core count increases.
 

DavidC1

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2023
2,123
3,254
106
Thats L2, 12Xe has 16MB of L2.
Buddy, that's merely semantics to me. It makes little difference. Their much larger B580 dGPU has only 18MB L2. For a mainstream market iGPU, Pantherlake has an extremely large GPU cache. They just didn't brand the thing that's all. It's like saying AMD has APUs but Intel doesn't. Actually, if AMD has APUs, so does Intel. It serves the same purpose, and their graph about the 16MB cache reducing memory traffic by 20% or something is similar to AMD's graph about IC. Strix Point has a puny 2MB cache.

Strix Halo scales because it's way more oversized thus the ideal perf/power point is much higher than Pantherlake.
In the early CES PTL previews on a ~60W device the budget sharing was roughly 50% for both CPU and iGPU. Maybe Intel could improve the power management over time.
At some point you need more power for CPU cores. If you want 30 fps, then 1.2GHz CPU is fine, but what if you want 60 fps, or even 100? That's only doable by a faster CPU. If what you are saying is true and they can get more performance, that's great, but that would be true mostly in the games that struggle to push frames.

@ToTTenTranz
15W Canis (full focus on gaming) being similar to 30W PTL-H (general purpose chip) doesn't mean Intel couldn't design a gaming-focused monolithic N3P/18A chip with e.g. 192bit L5X, 16 Xe3, 4P + 4E cores, no NPU, etc. that would perform a lot closer to Canis at 15W in gaming FPS / frametimes.
We know the 16 Xe3P core version doesn't exist though.

It's running the iGPU at 1GHz in CP2077 at 20W, and goes up to 1.5GHz at 35W. It's 60% faster. It's pretty much linear scaling in that instance.
 
Last edited:

Geddagod

Golden Member
Dec 28, 2021
1,667
1,696
136
Regardless, ThePhawx seems to have some unit in his hands and he's been making a battery of tests on Panther Lake H. We should be getting news about this within the next few days.
embargo goes down on the 26th at 9 am apparently (est)
N2 makes no sense to me if it's still a 12 Xe core version with the same amount of SIMD units. Isn't N3E cheaper and more than good enough for such a tiny iGPU?
Honestly that's my thought too.
Maybe Intel is going balls to the wall in effort though with NVL-H. Moving the compute tile to N2, now allegedly moving the iGPU tile, the cost structure has to be buns...
 

DavidC1

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2023
2,123
3,254
106
35W is much faster than 20W:
So in Cyberpunk 2077 and with those particular settings, even at 35W the GPU isn't clocking to the full potential, and at 78 fps, CPU is starting to have an effect on pushing more frames. In that particular instance, 65W might be quite a bit faster than 35W, maybe to the tune of 40%.
 

mikk

Diamond Member
May 15, 2012
4,332
2,413
136
Between 20W and 35W the iGPU clocks 50% higher.

From a Ryzen Max 385 Strix Halo at 45W and 25W in 1080p high:



In other games the iGPU clocks higher than in Cyberpunk there.
 

DavidC1

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2023
2,123
3,254
106
Wait, I am watching the video now and missed that 20W settings are different from 35W settings. 20W is 1200p Med with Xess Quality getting 50-55 fps, and 35W is 1200p Ultra with XeSS Quality, getting 70-78 fps. That's substantial.

The 20W getting 50-55 fps with 1GHz GPU clocks. When he turns on Frame Gen, it's still 1GHz, meaning it's CPU bound already. In Cyberpunk 2077, it seems it's already bound by CPU. This is why it's using 60% CPU @mikk