Intel admits its high-end desktop PC chips 'fumbled the football,' disusses 18A yield challenges and performance, Panther Lake ramp

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Intel Raptor Lake
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel's chief financial officer discussed the company's progress with the upcoming Panther Lake CPUs for laptops, as well as 18A (1.8nm-class) process technology, this week. The company admits that its CPUs for higher-end desktop systems are less competitive than it would like them to be compared to AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series offerings.

"As you know, we kind of fumbled the football on the desktop side, particularly the high-performance desktop side. So we're -- as you kind of look at share on a dollar basis versus a unit basis, we don't perform as well, and it's mostly because of this high-end desktop business that we didn't have a good offering this year," Intel CFO David Zinsner said.

“But Nova Lake, which is the next product, is a more complete set of SKUs,” Zinsner said. “It does address the high-end desktop market. And so we would expect that we will improve our position next year.”

"[Panther Lake] is still on track [to launch this year]," said David Zinsner at Deutsche Bank's 2025 Technology Conference (via SeekingAlpha). "Things are looking good. Our first SKU will be out by the end of this year, and then we will have more SKUs in the first half of 2026, and you will really start to see the volume ramp as we kind of migrate through 2026." 

"We would have liked to have gotten yield stabilized sooner, but as we were adjusting performance, yield tends to be what gets impacted," said Zinsner. "We are in a good — really good place on the performance, and now we are making kind of steady incremental improvement on yields on 18A. And we'll take those learnings to help us on 14A."

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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

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