It doesn't even beat Lunar Lake in efficiency (made on TSMC N3B) released in 2024.
[0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-...
Both the absolute performance and the performance per watt in single-thread benchmarks are determined mainly by the CPU design and they are only slightly constrained by the CPU fabrication process.
Only the multithreaded benchmarks are useful for comparing CMOS fabrication processes, because the performance in multithreaded benchmarks (with a given cooling system) is limited mainly by the energy required to switch a logic gate, which is a characteristic of the fabrication process, and they are only weakly dependent on the CPU design, as long as the CPU design does not have obvious mistakes.
In multithreaded benchmarks, CPUs work at a fixed power consumption, determined by the maximum allowable temperature and the cooling system. A fixed power means a fixed number of gates that switch per second. The completion of a given benchmark requires a similar number of gate switchings in well designed CPUs, in which case the performance in such a benchmark is fully determined by the fabrication process. Deviations from proportionality appear when some CPUs need much less gate switchings than others to complete some work, which happens for example when a CPU has wider vector or matrix execution units, e.g. by supporting AVX-512 or SME or AMX.
ST is far better than MT for this node comparison. MT is heavily influenced by core count, clock speed, core configuration. Panther Lake also has 3 tiers of cores compared to Arrow Lake's 2. The architecture for MT is entirely different.
Meanwhile, for ST, a core is a core. It's less or not affected by architectural changes to core configurations.
> With the new Panther Lake mobile processors, Intel has managed to successfully combine the two previous generations, Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, as the performance is even better than with Arrow Lake, while efficiency has been improved at the same time. Even with low power limits, the performance is very competitive, and Intel (in conjunction with the new GPUs) is therefore the better choice for slim laptops.
Their benchmarks say LNL is more efficient.
LNL has a much lower power consumption in the memory interface, like the Apple CPUs, which has nothing to do with the fabrication process. Also LNL is a lower performance CPU, for which it is normal to have better energy efficiency.
Only the comparison between Panther Lake and Arrow Lake H, which have equivalent structures, can be used to compare the Intel 18A and the TSMC 3-nm fabrication processes.
This comparison shows that Intel 18A ensures a better performance per watt, i.e. energy efficiency, which leads to a better multithreaded performance, but the TSMC 3-nm process, at least for now, allows higher maximum clock frequencies, which make possible a higher single-thread performance.
