Intel’s next-generation Panther Lake laptop chips could be a return to form

New laptop CPUs replace confusing bifurcated Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake lineups.

See full article...

 

[KaarlisK]

Improved integrated graphics is wonderful and all, but they just discontinued mainstream driver support from chips they're still selling as 14th gen. Everything with integrated graphics that's not Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake or Meteor Lake is already on a legacy branch.

 

[MRL256]

Is this the work of Pat Gelsinger coming to fruition? He seem to be the right kind of CEO to get the company back on track from a tech perspective. Assuming this is truly a return to the Intel of old.

 

[Deleted member 567875]

Don't worry, they'll screw it up somehow.

 

[Unknowable]

Improved integrated graphics is wonderful and all, but they just discontinued mainstream driver support from chips they're still selling as 14th gen. Everything with integrated graphics that's not Lunar Lake or Arrow Lake is already on a legacy branch.

I know I'm being cynical when my first thought upon reading this comment was that clearly the real return to form for Intel was adding in more planned obsolesce to force more consumer hardware turnover. Because while Intel isn't completely hopeless in the GPU market nowadays thanks to Arc, without driver support all that extra GPU horsepower is completely worthless.

Not that I have high hopes for Intel these days, what with the AI-pocalypse brewing in the financial markets, even if these chips turn out to be showstoppers on par with Ryzen or, hell even, Core 2 was back in the day, Intel is hurting for money right now even before the bottom falls out....

 

[abj]

Is this the work of Pat Gelsinger coming to fruition? He seem to be the right kind of CEO to get the company back on track from a tech perspective. Assuming this is truly a return to the Intel of old.

The one they fired last year?

 

[some guy in San Diego]

Arrow Lake U (which might as well be called Meteor Lake Refresh) has its compute die fabbed on Intel 3.

 

[fenris_uy]

I though that silicon wafers were expensive and limited, does Intel has an overproduction of silicon wafers that they can waste all that area in the filler tiles?

NVM, all the parts aren't made from the same wafer.

 

[WereCatf]

I feel....nothing. I find myself these days completely unfazed by Intel's CPUs, I feel like the well has run drier than a bedouin's sandal.

...no, I do actually feel something; I am annoyed by the forced inclusion of NPUs. I mean, sure, everyone's including them now, but I, for one, wish they'd just leave those out entirely or used the space for something more useful.

 

[Zizy]

which will presumably come to market under the "Core Ultra 300" banner, but the chips will no longer use a hodgepodge of mixed-and-matched technologies. All Panther Lake chips are still assembled with Foveros;

Yeah well, this part is fairly typical. But I really doubt ONLY Panther Lake will get Core 300 branding... so any "finally no more weird mix" is premature.

Drowning in lakes, indeed.

 

[williamyf]

The one they fired last year?

Yes, new architectures take 36 to 48 months to bring to market. New CEO has been in charge for less than 12 months. Y'all do the math on which CEO influenced these chips the most.

 

[Rick06]

Are they using a 128bit or a 256bit bus width for RAM?

 

[williamyf]

I feel....nothing. I find myself these days completely unfazed by Intel's CPUs, I feel like the well has run drier than a bedouin's sandal.

...no, I do actually feel something; I am annoyed by the forced inclusion of NPUs. I mean, sure, everyone's including them now, but I, for one, wish they'd just leave those out entirely or used the space for something more useful.

I will wager pennies to nickels that when Win12 arrives, an NPU will be mandatory.

Will 50TOPS be enough? Who knows. But a processor with an NPU has a slim chance to be compatible with Win12, a processor sans TPU will not be compatible from the get-go.

 

[TwoKiloBalls]

My work laptop is an Ultra 7 265H with an ARC iGPU and 32GB ram. It has great battery life, I really can't complain.

I know their desktop SKU leaves a lot to be desired but I think they're on the right track for mobile.

 

[williamyf]

I though that silicon wafers were expensive and limited, does Intel has an overproduction of silicon wafers that they can waste all that area in the filler tiles?

NVM, all the parts aren't made from the same wafer.

Silicon wafers are restricyed, but advanced nodes like IN3, IA18 or TSMC N2 are "even much moar more" restricted/limited.

So, the HUGE silicon interposer (made on IN22) and the fillers (probably made on a similar process) are not the bottleneck there.

 

[MRL256]

The one they fired last year?

Yes, new architectures take 36 to 48 months to bring to market. New CEO has been in charge for less than 12 months. Y'all do the math on which CEO influenced these chips the most.

Yes as Williamyf said there is a fair amount of lead time involved for a new process.

I personally thought they made a mistake in firing him since he seem to actually care about the chips.

 

[Steve austin]

I will wager pennies to nickels that when Win12 arrives, an NPU will be mandatory.

Will 50TOPS be enough? Who knows. But a processor with an NPU has a slim chance to be compatible with Win12, a processor sans TPU will not be compatible from the get-go.

Can that be considered even more reason to abandon Windows? Not that it matters - because of Windows, all of the laptop/desktop x86 chips (and the similarly targeted ARM chips) will have an NPU regardless.

 

[some guy in San Diego]

Yeah well, this part is fairly typical. But I really doubt ONLY Panther Lake will get Core 300 branding... so any "finally no more weird mix" is premature.

Drowning in lakes, indeed.

It might; Arrow Lake Refresh is basically just going to be minor clock speed bumps it seems, and Nova Lake is supposed to be late enough into next year that it probably gets Core Ultra 400 branding.

 

[althaz]

The one they fired last year?

They did fire him, but this will actually be the first product he would have been responsible for based on Intel's timelines if he hadn't been fired.

 

[MRL256]

If this was Pat's work they would have already outsourced the whole thing to TSMC. 18A was announced years ago, but the determination to actually use it is new management trying to get their fab business back in order.

Interesting and thank you

 

[SGalbincea]

After switching to AMD, I kind of wish they would drop the P-Core/E-Core nonsense. I don't feel like it has provided any value at all and honestly has caused more problems that it has solved. If (or until) it becomes a x86 architectural standard, and modern operating systems universally support it, just drop it from the mainstream.

 

[Zaragon]

After switching to AMD, I kind of wish they would drop the P-Core/E-Core nonsense. I don't feel like it has provided any value at all and honestly has caused more problems that it has solved. If (or until) it becomes a x86 architectural standard, and modern operating systems universally support it, just drop it from the mainstream.

Yeah, I abandoned Intel when they went to this architecture. I'm simply not interested in the hybrid core design, and it doesn't really do anything for my workload that isn't handled better by fewer full-sized cores. My next CPU will likely be a 9800X3D, which will be my first AMD CPU since the Athlon days.

 

[Dano40]

Yes, new architectures take 36 to 48 months to bring to market. New CEO has been in charge for less than 12 months. Y'all do the math on which CEO influenced these chips the most.

What’s ailing Intel will take 5-10 years to fix…… It won’t be quick, and there will be no shortcuts. And without an in-house OS, they will be a second rate chip company because times (technology) have changed and moved on, should have taken Steve Jobs seriously 18-20 years ago.

 

[williamyf]

Can that be considered even more reason to abandon Windows? Not that it matters - because of Windows, all of the laptop/desktop x86 chips (and the similarly targeted ARM chips) will have an NPU regardless.

Nope. Device side AI inference has its uses, even (or rather, more so) on linux. One needs the NPU to do that power-efficiently

 

[Stochastic]

Weirdly enough, MacBook Airs provide better value for money than most, if not all, ultrabooks (especially with the educator discount). Windows has annoyed me enough to the point where I'm planning on sticking with macOS for the foreseeable future. And AMD is eating Intel's lunch in the desktop space as the article points out. So for the time being, I am not terribly interested in Intel's products. We'll see if they can begin to turn things around.

 

[Dano40]

Weirdly enough, MacBook Airs provide better value for money than most, if not all, ultrabooks (especially with the educator discount). Windows has annoyed me enough to the point where I'm planning on sticking with macOS for the foreseeable future. And AMD is eating Intel's lunch in the desktop space as the article points out. So for the time being, I am not terribly interested in Intel's products. We'll see if they can begin to turn things around.

They can turn things around the problem is no one wants to hear it’s 5 to 10 years.

 

[evan_s]

If this was Pat's work they would have already outsourced the whole thing to TSMC. 18A was announced years ago, but the determination to actually use it is new management trying to get their fab business back in order.

I highly doubt that. The lead times on manufacturing chips, especially high end ones like this, are massive. The new CEO hasn't been in charge long enough for this to have been his call. It also would have been massively expensive to do that because it would mean making new masks which is not cheap for high end processes like this.

 

[gijames1225]

What’s ailing Intel will take 5-10 years to fix…… It won’t be quick, and there will be no shortcuts. And without an in-house OS, they will be a second rate chip company because times (technology) have changed and moved on, should have taken Steve Jobs seriously 18-20 years ago.

Why would they need their own OS? Both AMD and Qualcomm are successful, cutting-edge chip companies and neither has their own OS.

I do agree that Intel probably has at least 5 more years before they are fully recovered. Frankly, my biggest concern is the shortsightedness of the board and shareholders though, because the ability to think beyond the next quarterly report seems like a rare thing in capital these days.

 

[Mangosteen69]

They can turn things around the problem is no one wants to hear it’s 5 to 10 years.

Problem is, you can say that exact same sentence 5-10 years ago and it would be perfectly applicable.

 

[Incarnate]

And Intel says the chip consumes 10 percent less power than Lunar Lake

OK, so the chip uses less power, but what about the entire laptop/PC? I thought one of the major benefits of Lunar Lake was that the RAM was integrated and that brought significant power savings and longer battery life.

 

[greamlive]

So we will get even more crap AI stuff, I rather not use AI at all if I could.

 

[jwbaker]

OK, so the chip uses less power, but what about the entire laptop/PC? I thought one of the major benefits of Lunar Lake was that the RAM was integrated and that brought significant power savings and longer battery life.

The package-mounted RAM on Lunar Lake didn't save any energy compared to other ways of mounting LPDDR5x. It saved power compared to SO-DIMM slots. If you look at any modern laptop implementation the DRAM ICs are millimeters from the SoC, hardly any different from mounting them on the package.

What Intel got from package-mounted memory was supervision over the correct signal integrity for LPDDR5X-8533, on the tightly controlled impedance of their assembly, so they didn't have to worry about random Taiwanese laptop makers screwing it up and making them look bad.

 

[twilightomni]

we can expect up to a 10 percent improvement in single-core CPU performance compared to Lunar Lake

It’s worth considering Lunar Lake was known for relatively poor CPU performance at its release relative to existing chips (M2 and Snapdragon X1) at the time.

Those chips notably being on 5nm processes that are two generations older than 18A (which is nominally Intel’s 2nm equivalent).

GPU looks great.

 

[OrangeCream]

I feel....nothing. I find myself these days completely unfazed by Intel's CPUs, I feel like the well has run drier than a bedouin's sandal.

...no, I do actually feel something; I am annoyed by the forced inclusion of NPUs. I mean, sure, everyone's including them now, but I, for one, wish they'd just leave those out entirely or used the space for something more useful.

NPUs are useful. They’re just matrix math processor units. ML has been a mainstream feature for over a decade now, used anywhere pattern recognition or prediction is used today.

Auto correct, face recognition, image recognition, text recognition, speech recognition, language translation, text to speech, outlier detection, image enhancement, 3d mapping, and more.

 

[ChefJeff789]

Actual lead time on manufacturing is ~2-3 months, and this is a product that won't be available in volume until 2026.


FWIW Tan started in March 2025. He would certainly have made the call for products in 2026.

You think it only took 5 months to get 18A back on track, to get designs taped out, and the fabs rolling, I have a bridge to sell you... This work was ALL started under Gelsinger, not Tan. Gelsinger was hardly perfect, but I think Tan is a crappy choice. He seems too eager to abandon fabs altogether, and too eager to fire more people.

 

[Anton Longshot]

"That's not what Panther Lake is about, but hopefully we'll see these CPU, GPU, and NPU cores remixed into a compelling high-end desktop chip sooner rather than later"
While I agree, for me the laptop version would make a lot of sense in a PC too.
Good performance, low power (electricity's very expensive where I currently exist).
IIRC Intel doesn't like their laptop stuff ending up in desktops but maybe someone finds a workaround.

 

[OrangeCream]

Can that be considered even more reason to abandon Windows? Not that it matters - because of Windows, all of the laptop/desktop x86 chips (and the similarly targeted ARM chips) will have an NPU regardless.

Why would you abandon Windows over an NPU? You sound like the people complaining about Vista requiring a GPU, when today no one bats an eye over needing one to accelerate 3D because fundamentally 3D graphics is a superset of 2D graphics.

NPUs are matrix math processors. That’s used everywhere, but are most highly utilized in ML algorithms. Something as simple as predicting the next letter in a word, next word in a sentence, etc, use basic ML. That’s autocorrect for you. It’s used in network packet threat recognition, in text recognition algorithms, and language translation features. Image upscaling is the newest high end feature to use it, but ML is essentially everywhere.