Intel Panther Lake-H Motherboard Surfaces For Low-Power Mini ITX Builds

Intel's Panther Lake is the company's next-generation series of mobile processors that will succeed Arrow Lake in the mid-range "H" class as well as Lunar Lake in the odd "V" in-between power class. We won't be seeing Panther Lake products launching for at least a couple more months, but there are already motherboards and laptops popping up in some surprising places promising Panther Lake power.

The key product that we're going to focus on today is the DFI PTH171/PTH173 industrial motherboard, and that's because we have the most details about it. This board is listed as Preliminary, so we don't know everything, but there's still a lot to cover. DFI's advertising Panther Lake H processors up to 25W, and dual-channel DDR5 up to 128GB running at 7200 MT/s. That's almost assuredly with the help of CSODIMMs, which are the SODIMM equivalent of the desktop CUDIMMs, featuring clock drivers on each module.


This particular board has a ton of connectivity, owing to its design purpose as an embedded board for industrial applications. You get four display outs: DP++, HDMI 2.0, USB Type-C, and an M.2 A-key slot for one of DFI's own M2A-Display boards, allowing you to add another DP++ or HDMI port, or even VGA or eDP if you need it.

For internal expansion, you've got a PCIe 5.0 x4 slot, an M.2 slot for storage, another M.2 slot for a cellular modem, a third M.2 slot for a Wi-Fi card, and then a pair of SATA 6Gbps ports if you want to hook up some hard drives. External connectivity is more stacked, with triple 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.2 10 Gbps Type-A ports, five USB 2.0 headers, and headers for two regular old serial ports.
This configuration unfortunately doesn't reveal that much about Panther Lake itself, but the product family is expected to scale up to at least 45 watts, so 25W means this likely won't be the fastest configuration of that chip. Even still, with a new architecture and being fabbed on the bleeding-edge 18A process means that Panther Lake is probably pretty damn fast even at 25W.

One detail that DFI does reveal about the upcoming CPUs is that Intel is apparently planning to make Panther Lake parts for a full decade. Pretty interesting in light of rumors that Panther Lake was considered a transitional part just to get 18A up and running. Hopefully we find out more about Intel's new CPUs sooner than later, because we're itching to see performance numbers.

_{Thanks to x86 is dead & back for pointing out this board.}