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Just a few months after Pat Gelsinger presented Panther Lake Engineering Samples live at the Lenovo Tech World event, Intel reports that Panther Lake has now achieved power-on status at eight customers. During the Barclays 22nd Annual Global Technology Conference, the two interim co-CEOs at Intel dispelled rumors regarding 18A and the scheduled Panther Lake for launch in 2025.
Panther Lake, dubbed Core Ultra 300, is expected to be the successor to Intel's Arrow Lake-U/H family of CPUs, the latter of which is rumored to launch next month. These CPUs will be the first to be built using Intel's flagship 18A process as Intel looks to break free from TSMC. Over 70% of Panther Lake will be manufactured in-house. From what we can gather, Panther Lake is a mobile-first product.
Michelle Johnston Holthaus and David Zinsner, co-CEOs at Intel, confirmed that Panther Lake is in the hands of eight customers who've successfully achieved power-on status with ES0 silicon - likely the first Engineering Samples. Intel's turnaround hinges on 18A - powering Clearwater Forest and Panther Lake - so much so that ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger had to step in at X to set the record straight. While Intel didn't explicitly mention yields or newer defect density measures, this is still a positive development, given the recent corporate fiasco and all the FUD surrounding the firm.
"Now we are using Intel Foundry for Panther Lake, which is our 2025 product, which will land on 18A. But just to give some assurances, on Panther Lake, we have our ES0 samples out with customers. We have eight customers that have powered on, which gives you just kind of an idea that the health of the silicon is good and the health of the Foundry is good."
IntelPanther Lake is rumored to reintegrate the memory controller back into the Compute Tile to ward off latency issues similar to Arrow Lake. The latency issue is actually due to several reasons but largely stems from an outdated SoC Tile and an off-die design.
With upwards of 16 cores, Panther Lake isn't a successor to Lunar Lake but rather Arrow Lake. Architecturally speaking, we expect Intel to use Cougar Cove P-cores and Skymont/Darkmont E-cores. With Lunar Lake already in the lead, Panther Lake might officially dethrone AMD in the graphics department - set to feature up to 12 Xe3 (Celestial) iGPU (Integrated GPU) cores.
2025 will be a make-it or break-it year for Intel, and ultimately, if the company wants to transition away from TSMC for leading-edge nodes, all of its offerings hinge on 18A's success. Like Lunar Lake, Intel might reveal Panther Lake at Computex next year, but a late 2025 launch is also on the cards.
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