Intel debuts Panther Lake AI chips, aiming to regain PC market

Intel launched Panther Lake, its new AI chip for laptops, on Monday at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, as the company seeks to reassure investors about the first product made using its next-generation manufacturing process called 18A.

Jim Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's PC group, offered technical details about the company's first line of Panther Lake chips known as Intel Core Ultra Series 3. The chips feature a new transistor design and a way to deliver power to the chip due to the company's 18A manufacturing process.

At the event, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company made good on its promise to ship its first products with the 18A manufacturing process in 2025, referring to the Panther Lake chips.

Intel's prior-generation Lunar Lake chips were largely made by TSMC. The stakes for Intel are high - the company is making its first high-volume product with 18A, and hopes to reclaim market share it has lost to Advanced Micro Devices.

Johnson said the company has created a separate graphics chiplet - a mini chip stitched together with other mini-chips to form a complete processor. On Monday, Intel said the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips would deliver 60% better performance than the prior-generation Lunar Lake Series 2.

Intel plans to launch a platform for handheld video games based on the Panther Lake designs this year, Johnson said. Handheld PCs designed by a range of suppliers have grown in popularity in recent years.

Intel has struggled with the yield, or the number of good chips per silicon wafer, for the Panther Lake processors, Reuters reported last year. Intel executives have said its yields are improving monthly and will pave the way for the launch this year.

For its part, AMD plans to give a CES keynote address at 9:30 p.m. EST on Monday (0230 GMT on Tuesday). CEO Lisa Su will likely launch new generations of PC chips that are geared for AI and graphics.

AMD announced a multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI for its next-generation MI400 chips, some of which the companies plan to deploy this year. The deal with the ChatGPT maker is expected to generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the chip designer.

The CEO of AI chip leader Nvidia, Jensen Huang, also spoke at CES on Monday. He said the company’s next generation of chips was in “full production,” and they could deliver five times the artificial-intelligence computing of the company’s previous chips when serving up chatbots and other AI apps.