Almost 14 months ago, Intel launched its first multi-tile processor, codenamed Meteor Lake, for laptop PCs. Just nine months later, it was joined by the much-improved Lunar Lake chip, for the ultra-low power market and at this year’s CES event, Intel briefly demonstrated its successor, Panther Lake. As this is the first processor to be made on Intel’s 18A process node, the little chip garnered quite the attention.

2024 is almost a year in which Intel would prefer that everyone would be and in the mega-tech ces this year, he sang his own praises on how he plans to cause things in the coming months. In the most sensible of the list, although it only gave the brief impression at the conference, Panther Lake, the architectural successor of the well received Lunar Lake.

The interim co-zo, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, had a pattern of the small chip in soft so that the crowd gathered of reporters sees it.

“Panther Lake, our lead product on Intel 18A, will launch in the second half of this year. It will take everything you love about Lunar Lake, all the advances in the architecture, to the next level. We have systems already running Panther Lake, and we’re sampling it across all of our major customers already.”

A variety of other Panther Lake laptops were demonstrated in another stand, however, since the processor is still under development, no one was allowed to play with machines or practice them in operation.

Not that Panther Lake will really matter for PC gaming because while some gaming laptops have sported Meteor Lake CPUs, almost none are using Lunar Lake. The exception, and it is a very loose exception, is MSI’s Claw 8 handheld gaming PC. That’s clearly not a laptop but Lunar Lake does pretty well in that format, so there’s a good chance that Panther Lake might appear in the odd handheld or two.

The one thing we do know about Intel’s next-gen processor is that it won’t be using on-package DRAM like Lunar Lake does. This should help to make the chip more palatable to system vendors, who want to offer customers a broad range of products, especially in the budget sector. Compared to a typical laptop CPU, Lunar Lake is quite expensive and rather limited in scope, because it has two DRAM chips bonded to the package.

Investors will be very attentive to how intelligent Panther Lake is because it is the first advertising chip that gets rid of Intel’s production line. The previous CEO, Pat Gelsinger, “opted the entire company for the 18th” and if the small processor turns out to be a miniature wonder, its bet will be completely justified. Otherwise, it is difficult to see how Intel Foundry can continue to work.

It might just be for a fairly niche sector but an awful lot of Intel’s fortunes are going to be riding on Panther Lake. For the consumer’s sake (i.e. a competitive market), let’s hope it’s as good as Intel says it is.

Consider those 2025 – we’re on the floor in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in Tech, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI, and more.

Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in 1981, with the love affair starting on a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and a book on ZX Basic. He ended up becoming a physics and IT teacher, but by the late 1990s decided it was time to cut his teeth writing for a long defunct UK tech site. He went on to do the same at Madonion, helping to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its gaming and hardware section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com and over 100 long articles on anything and everything. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open world grindy RPGs, but who isn’t these days? 

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