Jim Johnson, Intel’s senior vice president and general manager of the PC group, provided technical details on the Panther Lake line, officially branded as the Intel Core Ultra Series 3. The chips feature a new transistor design and an innovative power-delivery system, enabled by the 18A process, which Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said fulfills the company’s 2025 promise to ship products using the advanced technology.
Intel’s previous Lunar Lake chips were largely manufactured by TSMC, and Panther Lake represents a key step in Intel’s effort to reclaim market share from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Johnson highlighted a separate graphics chiplet design, a mini-chip integrated with others to form a complete processor. Intel claims Panther Lake delivers up to 60% better performance than the previous Lunar Lake Series 2 chips.
The company plans to leverage Panther Lake for handheld gaming PCs later this year, a growing segment in the portable computing market. Despite previous yield challenges—how many functional chips can be produced per silicon wafer—Intel executives reported improvements that pave the way for the product launch.
Intel’s announcement comes as AMD and Nvidia also showcased major AI chip developments at CES. AMD CEO Lisa Su previewed its MI400 series chips and the upcoming MI500, promising up to 1,000 times the performance of older processors, while highlighting a multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI expected to generate tens of billions in revenue.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated the next-generation Vera Rubin platform, already in full production, which he said delivers five times the AI computing power of the company’s previous chips for chatbots and other AI applications.
The simultaneous announcements underscore the intensifying competition in AI and high-performance computing, with Intel aiming to regain momentum in laptops, AMD expanding in data centers, and Nvidia maintaining its leadership in AI-focused processors.