I saw Intel's new 'Panther Lake' chip first-hand - it could be a company turning point

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Intel's Panther Lake chips enter mass production this year. Built on Intel's long-awaited 18A process technology. Intel hopes Panther Lake revives its consumer market success. Intel just announced its latest lineup of client processors, the Core Ultra Series 3, codenamed "Panther Lake," its first large-scale chips made with the new 18A manufacturing process. At a recent preview event in Arizona, the semiconductor giant hosted press and industry analysts (myself included), showing off its new multi-billion-dollar manufacturing fab and first glimpses of the new chips, all while positioning the moment as a turning point for the company. "We're building a new Intel," Sachin Katti, the company's senior VP, proclaimed at the beginning of his keynote speech -- a theme repeated multiple times during the event. Also: How Nvidia and OpenAI's staggering $100 billion deal could fuel a new age of AI It's been a wild ride for the company over the last year, with its main competitors AMD and Qualcomm gaining ground in a market Intel is used to dominating. The steady stream of thin and light "Copilot+ PCs" and cool, power-efficient ARM-compatible chips have left Intel struggling to keep up, punctuated by AI technology, internal shuffling, and political pressure. In the last few months alone, the federal government under President Trump purchased a 9.9% stake in Intel for $8.9 billion with money from the Biden-era CHIPS Act, which set aside funds for American semiconductor companies to stay competitive against rising foreign manufacturers like TSMC. Intel wants to reposition itself as the premier semiconductor manufacturer in the industry and is betting big that Panther Lake (and its next generation of 18A server chips, codenamed Clearwater Forest) will reignite trust in the product. If jump-starting this trust is at the core of the company's 2026 plans, it's the technology that will drive it forward. A glimpse inside Panther Lake Intel Panther Lake processors, set to hit the consumer market in January 2026, will aim to combine the strengths of its Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips, Intel says, supporting LPDRR5 memory up to 9GB at speeds of up to 9600 MT/s and DDR5 up to 128GB. The result? Essentially a next-gen Lunar Lake chip with an added efficiency core. The Panther Lake chips will be the first products made with the new 18A manufacturing process that has been in development for months, utilizing RibbonFET transistors and PowerVia architecture. Also: Why Intel Panther Lake's 'boring' updates could mean big wins for gamers All of this transistor technology gets technical very fast, but Intel is insistent on 18A's status as breakthrough tech, along with being industry-first in its implementation of backside power delivery, which essentially comes down to more efficiency, more power, and more longevity. This new 18A base configuration is built on eight cores: four P-cores (which Intel has named Cougar Cove) and four LP-cores (named Darkmont), with Intel's new Xe3 GPU that will support 3.8 times more TOPS over Arrow Lake. Also: What Nvidia's stunning $5 billion Intel bet means for enterprise AI and next-gen laptops Intel's biggest goal here in its delivery to consumer products is efficiency, optimizing the mechanics of a "hybrid core strategy" with the P-core driving ST performance and throughput, the E-core driving MT performance and parallelism, and the LP E-core driving efficiency. Intel was keen to show off Panther Lake's power efficiency during the event. One demo featured three laptops with Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake chips running the exact same multitasking workloads with live readouts of system power, with Panther Lake pulling ahead of Lunar Lake by a few points, depending on the task. Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET Switching up the paradigm It's not enough that the technology is "getting better" -- there's also an architecture transformation happening, moving from a single, heterogeneous chip to a system of chips with Panther Lake. Also: Intel's new CEO vows to run chipmaker 'as a startup, on day one' "We're experiencing a paradigm shift in both complexity and value," Kevin O'Buckley, SVP and GM of Intel's Foundry Services, said during his keynote. "We were so focused on integrating as much as we could into a single chip, but what we're seeing now is systems of chips." The energy requirements for these SoCs have been major engineering challenges, Intel says. Moving from four reticle fields to 12 or more, the body size of these chips is steadily increasing, requiring potentially vastly different physical designs and architectures. Let the consumers decide Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET So what does this mean for the consumer? The Panther Lake SoC will feature scalable performance for the so-called "AI PC," the next generation of consumer, commercial, and gaming devices designed for AI. This means support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, and potentially overall better battery life than we saw with Lunar Lake, which was varied but overall quite good. For example, the Asus Zenbook S14 with Lunar Lake saw upwards of 17 hours during my testing, and the Dell XPS 13 -- one of my favorite laptops of 2024 -- gave me over 16, among others. Also: Intel touts new Xeon chip's AI power in bid to fend off AMD, ARM advances But it's not just about battery life. Intel has some serious competition here when it comes to delivering a product in the short term and solidifying trust in its future. One thing I can say for sure is that there is an air of confidence on the ground at Intel, extending beyond press releases and PR talk. Ultimately, though, we'll have to wait until early next year to get our hands on the first consumer-facing laptops with Panther Lake chips, some of which we'll likely see at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. With a new generation of chips and some security (and blessing) from the US government itself, Intel just might be ready to turn over a new leaf. Like everything, however, it will ultimately be the consumers who decide. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.