Panther Lake does not have new CPU cores.

The Panther Lake cores, i.e. Darkmont and Cougar Cove are the Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake cores, i.e. Skymont and Lion Cove, ported from the TSMC 3 nm to the Intel 18A fabrication process.

The Panther Lake cores have only minor changes, i.e. bug fixes and the addition of a new mechanism for interrupts and exceptions, FRED. A preliminary version of FRED is likely to have already been implemented on Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake, but if so it was disabled there after production.

In any case FRED will not cause improvements in the present benchmarks, as it is used only inside the operating system and the current operating systems are unlikely to have been updated to use it anyway.

In contradiction with what you say, ST performance or performance per watt cannot be used to compare fabrication processes but only the multithreaded performance can bu used for this purpose.

Single-thread performance is affected by a lot of factors that have nothing to do with the fabrication process, but all those have little or no influence on multithreaded performance.

The reason is that in any well optimized MT workload, the CPU runs at a constant power consumption. This eliminates the influence of all factors mentioned by you.

I have already explained in another comment that a constant power consumption means a constant number of gate switchings per second, which is determined by the energy required to switch a logical gate, which is a characteristic of a fabrication process.

When a given amount of work is done by a benchmark using the same algorithm, well-designed CPUs will need approximately the same number of gate switchings to complete the work, regardless of the number of cores included in a CPU.

Significant variations of the numbers of gate switchings can be caused only by architectural differences like the width of vector and matrix execution units. Smaller variations are caused by various quality characteristics of a CPU core design, like the frequencies of branch mispredictions and of cache misses, which should be similar for CPU design teams that do not differ much in competence.

When we compare equivalent cores in different fabrication processes, like Arrow Lake H vs. Panther Lake, the multithreaded benchmarks are almost unaffected by anything else except the fabrication process, assuming that the cooling systems are also equivalent.