Big cat sighting: Intel shows off Panther Lake at Computex

Yahoo

09-06-2025

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Computex 2025 was a rather quiet show this year, and no company was quite as quiet as Intel.
We didn't get a keynote or a press conference from Team Blue, but that doesn't mean the company was entirely silent.
In small press demos, Intel showcased its new flagship Arc Pro B50 and B60 GPUs and walked folks through the recent improvements to the Arrow Lake lineup.
For the company's upcoming 18A flagship CPU, Panther Lake did appear in two demos on test rigs. While we still haven't had a deep dive into Panther Lake, here's what we know so far.
Intel's Panther Lake chipset is expected to enter production this fall with a full consumer-ready launch beginning in early 2026. Panther Lake is a chipset built for mobile platforms and will likely hit the shelves as the Intel Core Ultra 300 series with the classic H and U suffixes.
Panther Lake is the first commercial chip to be made with Intel's 18A (1.8nm) foundry process, and will thus be the company's first chipset made on a two-nanometer-class process node.
Intel's Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake series was a 'one-off' in that the suffix won't be reused in the 300 series. But that doesn't mean the chipset is entirely done. Intel sees Panther Lake as a "best of both worlds" solution, with the power efficiency of Lunar Lake and the performance of Arrow Lake H.
Intel is also updating its Arc integrated graphics platform to fit on the Panther Lake SoC (system-on-a-chip), offering enhanced 3D rendering and AI performance.
Intel expects Panther Lake chipsets to power consumer laptops, gaming hardware (including potential gaming handhelds), and commercial laptops, from standard business productivity devices to workstations.
As the Panther Lake chipset is still not in full production, Intel was showcasing the new silicon in reference validation platforms and prototype dev kits used in Intel's internal test labs.
Intel's demo team tasked Panther Lake with automatic AI masking in DaVinci Resolve, and the color changes and text implementation were done near instantaneously.
Intel also demonstrated Panther Lake's LLM power with Qwen 2.5, tasking the AI with creating a Python program. Panther Lake's AI accelerators kicked back an instant token, essentially doing the work of weeks (or months) in a heartbeat.
Intel's final Panther Lake demo was again an AI task, this time using Topaz Labs' photo upscaling to increase the pixel count and balance the colors of a photo simultaneously.
But don't just take my word for it. Intel published a walkthrough of all three Panther Lake demos to YouTube.
Since Intel makes chips and not end-user devices, the performance seen in the demos may not be entirely indicative of what we get from laptop manufacturers.
But the demos are incredibly compelling, even if performance is likely to vary across different slices of the chipset and different OEM configurations.
Panther Lake is on track for production in the second half of this year, with a full consumer launch expected in early 2026.
If any early Panther Lake systems do end up hitting the market, I wouldn't expect to see them until at least October.
Lunar Lake launched in early September last year, but Arrow Lake H didn't come in until February, so Panther Lake is likely to come somewhere between those two timeframes.
We'll likely get more details on Panther Lake over the summer, if not at a full press conference, as part of an Intel Tech Tour. The initial launch could come any time between September and December 2025, with broader availability coming between January and March.
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