Intel faces serious threat in the laptop market, not just from its nemesis AMD but also Qualcomm and Apple, thanks to the arrival of high-performance, highly efficient ARM cores that have forced the chipmaker to up every part of its game to compete. With 50% more oomph and 30% less power draw, the Core Ultra 3-series 'Panther Lake' processor is a robust response to those rivals — and at a financial event on Tuesday, Intel announced enormous progress toward delivering the goods.
When Intel announced mass production of Panther Lake about a month ago, the company openly admitted that all wafers for the initial CPUs would be made at pilot production lines in Oregon; the new Arizona fabs built on CHIPS ACT money would catch up later. Later means Q1, apparently, and the Arizona fabs should ramp up, the company said. This means costs might stay low, and crucially, yields will grow quickly (though likely remain low in 2026), all of which spells good news for anyone considering a new laptop.
“We now have a predictable path for yield improvement,” said John Pitzer, corporate vice president of corporate planning and investor relations at Intel.
Panther Lake is one of the first products to be fabricated on Intel's leading-edge 18A node, likely the industry's first high-volume process to incorporate two major innovations meant to enable future scaling and power efficiency gains: gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, which Intel calls RibbonFETs, and a backside power delivery network, which Intel calls PowerVia.
Efficient, cutting edge, and on time? For Intel, Panther Lake may be a rare animal indeed.
Low yields, high costs, but a good improvement pace
"Initially on any new process, we take wafers from Oregon," said John Pitzer, corporate vice president of corporate planning and investor relations at Intel, at RBC Capital Markets Global Technology, Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference 2025. "Oregon is where we do all of our technology development and then move into quasi high-volume manufacturing."
"Those wafers tend to be pretty expensive. Most, if not all, of the Panther Lake wafers this year are coming from Oregon. As we transition into Q1, you will start to see wafers coming in from Arizona [which] has a much better and different cost structure, and that ramps throughout the year," Pitzer said.
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Most likely, Intel has not yet initiated mass production of Panther Lake's compute tiles using its 18A process technology at Fab 52 in Arizona due to low yields. The company wants to achieve the highest yield possible on its pilot lines at the D1X fab in Ohio, where developers of the production nodes and process engineers are, and only then transfer the recipe to its production facility in Arizona. As a result, Intel is poised to use low-yield, high-cost wafers for the initial batches of Panther Lake, which is not good news for its costs – but a normal situation in the chip-making world.
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