According to a new rumor, the cores that do most of the grunt work, as opposed to smaller efficiency cores in its hybrid CPUs, are expected to be a big leap forward for Instructions Per Clock tech.

All this means that processors built with this future architecture will be able to get tasks done faster (literally processing more instructions every clock cycle).

Tom’s Hardware spotted the rumour in a post on the Real World Technologies forum.

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

Panther Cove has nothing to do with Intel’s Panther Lake processors, which are a family of processors. In fact, the two do not even exist together.  Panther Lake CPUs will use the Cougar Cove architecture (processor families are ‘Lakes’ and architectures are ‘Coves’).

Since Intel’s next-gen Arrow Lake desktop processors will use Lion Cove for their performance cores, we’ll have Panther Lake – laptop CPUs only, arriving in 2025 – with Cougar Cove.

Then we get Panther Cove, which, in theory, would be the Nova Lake family (Intel's next desktop chip after Arrow Lake). Others claim Nova Lake performance cores will be built on Coyote Cove, making everything a mess. 

Whatever the case, significant gains are in the pipeline for the architecture that follows Arrow and Panther Lake, quite possibly the Core Ultra 400 chips.

Advanced Performance Extensions will also help speed up apps, and could have a pretty wide impact, depending on how much developers use it. This is more likely to be for apps than games, but the major game engines could take advantage of APX for further gains.