Intel Panther Lake Arc B390 performance and efficiency analysis: Intel's new iGPU trades blows with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050

[je07681]

@opckieran 15 hours ago
,,Intel has just delivered +70% iGPU..."
Yep, just a slight correction – TSMC, not Intel :)

What is the name of the TSMC iGPU involved?  Or are you confusing who fabbed the iGPU chip with the actual product?

[ObsfuNOT]

Why is there no full Render configuration Information on that Intel slide In the Form of Shaders:TMUs:ROPs? And how are folks to get the Theoretical maximum GTexel and GPixel processing rates to compare to other's iGPU designs that have the Shaders:TMUs:ROPs info published. I'm sure that just listing the RT and Matrix Math units counts is insufficient as there are still Raster Only Gaming Titles out there that still get played and if AI Up_scaling or Frame generation is not used because it's not really needed for a 5W gaming title!

[opckieran]

@opckieran 15 hours ago
,,Intel has just delivered +70% iGPU..."
Yep, just a slight correction – TSMC, not Intel :)

What is the name of the TSMC iGPU involved?  Or are you confusing who fabbed the iGPU chip with the actual product?

That's his whole shtick. He's a fanboy with a late '90s personal computing mindset who can't stand the fact that Intel delivered a good product, so he tries to deflect by crediting the manufacturing node over Intel's engineering here (which is pointless; delivered products are what count, not the node).

Funnier still, he has failed to consider the basic notion that by his ridiculous "logic", neither AMD nor nVidia are responsible for their own processors either; since they are both fabbed by TSMC as well, which... undermines his entire argument. Whoops! 🤣 The sign of a true "genius" folks...

[M2026]

"The sign of a true "genius" folks..."
You proved your "brilliant" logic by not understanding my point about foreigners, because even an idiot would understand that :)))

"Intel delivered a good product"
Do you mean a 2-4% performance increase (CPU) compared to the previous generation? At this rate, only our future grandchildren will experience a doubling of performance.

[Choom]

It actually gets worse. Medusa point is actually halving the their RDNA3.5  CU count to make space for the increased CPU cores. Forget keeping the performance the same, AMD is reverting it the other way, they're going backwards..

So I guess z3 extreme will me slower than z2 extreme, if it is based on Medusa point?!? :3

Dear lord. AMD. Wtf are you doing?!?!?

People will literally jump ship to arm as an alternative if you gonks don't wake the duck up out of your Cyberpsychosis. It's no wonder valve is working with fex for x86 emulation on arm.

Our only hope left for improvements to igpu now, besides intel is arm as an alternative, with Snapdragon X2 elite and n1x. AMD full on vacation for the next 2 years. Possibly more. Lol, "steam deck 2 rumours" rip to that being AMD anymore too.

[AMD doing the right thing]

Choom, AMD buys silicon wafers from TSMC and where is the most money for any chip, cut out of such a wafer, right now? In enterprise/AI boom. So, AMD is doing what not only their share holders want them to do. It would be retarded to miss out on the money just to make some normie gamers happy and go bankrupt afterwards.
So, don't worry, at some point AMD will release a competitive 128-bit APU (once they sold enough AI chips and made enough money to then be able so afford TSMC' 3N node ;-)) See how it works.

[perf on linux not good]

phoronix.com/review/intel-arc-b390-panther-lake-linux

On Linux the perf of the Arc B390 (a X7 358H) isn't great, but the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus laptop is also using only LPDDR5X-8533, not 9600 MT/s, memory. A X9 388H using 9600 MT/s memory scores like 16% to 17% higher (device is a ASUS Zenbook Duo (UX8407AA)) than the 358H, which correlate to the increased memory bandwidth of 9600 MT/s memory: 1.125 = 9600/8533.

[FPS per weight]

Interestingly, all the Arc B390 implementations score only averagely in terms of FPS per laptop weight:

In terms of FPS per weight, the Asus ZenBook Duo UX8407AA scores 7190 in 2560x1440 Time Spy Graphics and weights 1.7kg. 7190/1700 = 4.23.

Go to notebookcheck.net/Benchmarks-and-Test-Results.142793.0.html and compare for yourself (import into a spreadsheet and add a new column, which divides the Time Spy Graphics score by each laptop's weight).

Just for comparison:

• Highest score: Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 GA402XY scores 10.58 and a Razer Blade 16 2025 RTX 5090 scores 10.57. This is 2.50 times the Duo's score. Of course, 2 screens add weight (and price).
• Highest 4050 Laptop score: 4.77 (Lenovo Yoga Pro 9-14IRP G8)
• Lowest 4050 Laptop score: 2.85 (Dell XPS 14 2024 OLED)
• Highest 4060 Laptop score: 7.33 (Asus ROG Flow Z13 GZ301V
• Lowest 4060 Laptop score: 3.78 (MSI Cyborg 15 A12VF
• Average 4060 Laptop scores: 6.01 (Lenovo Legion Slim 5 14APH8) and 7.12 (Asus TUF Gaming A14 FA401WV-WB94)

If one considers a normal, non duo screen, Arc B390 laptop, the FPS per weight score is much higher: notebookcheck.net/Asus-ExpertBook-Ultra-review-One-helluva-debut-for-Intel-Panther-Lake-X7.1209366.0.html:
6.54 = 7270/1111 ("1.111 kg").

[Prassel]

It actually gets worse. Medusa point is actually halving the their RDNA3.5  CU count to make space for the increased CPU cores. Forget keeping the performance the same, AMD is reverting it the other way, they're going backwards..

Dear lord. AMD. Wtf are you doing?!?!?

I'm also speculating, that both INTEL and AMD, don't want their mainstream iGPUs be stronger than a GTX 1050 Ti ...

Which could explain why mainstream Panther Lake iGPU only gets 4-Xe (instead of 8-Xe as in Arrow Lake),
and mainstream AMD Medusa Point iGPU will only get 8 CUs iGPU (instead of 16 CUs as in Strix Point).


And they probably want everything above these mainstream specs sell as a "premium chips":

- Which would be the Panther Lake 12-Xe iGPU, which already comes at premium price only.
- And while AMD does have a "Halo" chip, it's too expensive to produce, and probably decided to go similar ways as Intel. Which means they'll make a cheaper chip become their premium chip, and which will probably be a Medusa Point 16-CUs iGPU, sold at similar premium price as Intel Panther Lake.

[in LLM terms]

It actually gets worse. Medusa point is actually halving the their RDNA3.5  CU count to make space for the increased CPU cores. Forget keeping the performance the same, AMD is reverting it the other way, they're going backwards..

Dear lord. AMD. Wtf are you doing?!?!?

I'm also speculating, that both INTEL and AMD, don't want their mainstream iGPUs be stronger than a GTX 1050 Ti ...

Which could explain why mainstream Panther Lake iGPU only gets 4-Xe (instead of 8-Xe as in Arrow Lake),
and mainstream AMD Medusa Point iGPU will only get 8 CUs iGPU (instead of 16 CUs as in Strix Point).


And they probably want everything above these mainstream specs sell as a "premium chips":

- Which would be the Panther Lake 12-Xe iGPU, which already comes at premium price only.
- And while AMD does have a "Halo" chip, it's too expensive to produce, and probably decided to go similar ways as Intel. Which means they'll make a cheaper chip become their premium chip, and which will probably be a Medusa Point 16-CUs iGPU, sold at similar premium price as Intel Panther Lake.

See it in a positive way of not buying them: Medusa Halo and Strix Halo are neither here, nor there: Strix Halo is 4060 Laptop performance (=slow prompt processing) (I'm comparing for LLM performance, because this is how AMD is advertising Strix Halo). Furthermore, when it comes to gaming, both are only RDNA3.5 (Medusa Halo is rumored to be RDNA3.5, anyway) and as such, don't have the ML hardware cores of RDNA4 for proper DLSS-type of upscaling and 4060 Laptop perfs isn't that great either. Another "positive way": Strix Halo' memory bandwidth is only 256 GB/s and it only supports up to 128 GB RAM, which is even worse for fitting proper, smart, LLMs or their 4-bit (or more) quants. 256 GB RAM are required at the very least for good LLMs.

[Arasaka-Militech]

But what's the point of looking at TimeSpy score to weight ratio? I don't get it.

Performance on Linux I can pretty much guarantee will improve in due time. So not worried about that.

[Small correction]

Medusa Halo is rumored to be RDNA3.5

Initially it was thought to be but the common consensus now is most definitely that it'll be RDNA5.

[in LLM terms]

Medusa Halo is rumored to be RDNA3.5

Initially it was thought to be but the common consensus now is most definitely that it'll be RDNA5.

This sounds like the common consensus is very sure of it. RDNA5 even? Would be nice. I want Medusa Halo to have (up to) 256 GB RAM.

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is out and the 4-bit Q4_K_M quant requires 241 GB RAM. Same goes for many recently released open weight LLMs, all require 256 GB RAM to fit at least a usable quant.

Just another one for example: huggingface.co/unsloth/GLM-5-GGUF:

The full 744B parameter (40B active) model has a 200K context window and was pre-trained on 28.5T tokens. The full GLM-5 model requires 1.65TB of disk space, while the Unsloth Dynamic 2-bit GGUF reduces the size to 241GB (-85%), and dynamic 1-bit is 176GB (-89%): GLM-5-GGUF