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.
However, the company is optimistic that its rather monstrous Nova Lake CPU, which is rumored to come with up to 52 cores, will outpace products offered by its rival in the second half of 2026.
“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."
Intel is on track to further ramp up production of its rather popular Core Ultra 200-series 'Lunar Lake' processors and release the first Core Ultra 300-series 'Panther Lake' CPU late this year, which essentially means that the bulk of Intel shipments this year and early next will be Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake products. Apparently, the company had to tweak the performance of its Panther Lake CPUs, which affected yields on its 18A process technology.
"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."
Intel’s CFO naturally didn't disclose the technical aspects of Panther Lake’s yield-related issues and whether we are dealing with parametric yield issues (fully functional chips cannot hit new performance targets at desired power levels) or functional yield issues (some parts of the chip are defective because of the high defect density of the process technology).
Yet, Intel needs to achieve decent yields with its 18A process technology as soon as possible, not only for Panther Lake products or its foundry business, but also for its Nova Lake desktop CPU and next-generation data center products.
Intel also admits that while its data center-oriented Xeon 6-series CPUs are more competitive than previous-generation offerings, it is not enough to stop AMD from taking market share. Therefore, the company is pinning its hopes on its 18A-based Diamond Rapids processors slowing down the expansion of its rival in the server market, but they won't take the lead, according to the CFO. Coral Rapids will further improve the company’s position.
"It doesn't get us quite there," Zinsner said about Diamond Rapids, "I mean, it does in certain cases, the performance is actually better. But in other cases, it's not. And so we've got more work to do to finally get to a place. And it's really not -- I think Lip-Bu actually named the product in some forum, but Coral Rapids is the next product."
Then again, it will likely take years for Intel to recover in the data center space. Still, the successful ramp of 18A is a crucial step in that direction.
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