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

Summary

Intel says that systems with these chips in them should be shipping by the end of the year. In recent years, the company has launched a small handful of ultraportable-focused CPUs at the end of the year, and then followed that up with a more fully fleshed-out midrange and high-end lineup at CES in January—we'd expect Intel to stick to that basic approach here. Panther Lake draws near Panther Lake tries to combine different aspects of the last-generation Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips. Intel Panther Lake tries to combine different aspects of the last-generation Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips. Intel Panther Lake combines three functional chiplets using Intel's Foveros packaging technology. Intel Panther Lake combines three functional chiplets using Intel's Foveros packaging technology. Intel The three Panther Lake dies use the same package design, making for easy interchangeability for PC manufacturers. Intel The three Panther Lake dies use the same package design, making for easy interchangeability for PC manufacturers. Intel Panther Lake combines three functional chiplets using Intel's Foveros packaging technology. Intel The three Panther Lake dies use the same package design, making for easy interchangeability for PC manufacturers. Intel Intel's first Core Ultra chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, were introduced two years ago. There were three big changes that separated these from the 14th-generation Core CPUs and their predecessors: They were constructed of multiple silicon tiles, fused together into one with Intel's Foveros packaging technologies; some of those tiles were manufactured by TSMC rather than Intel; and they added a neural processing unit (NPU) that could be used for on-device machine learning and generative AI applications. The second-generation Core Ultra chips continued to do all three of those things, but Intel pursued an odd bifurcated strategy that gave different Core Ultra 200-series processors significantly different capabilities. The most intere...