Intel CEO says Panther Lake CPU on its new 18A node is already up and running with production slated for next year

In a break from his usual sideline of posting pithy excerpts from the Bible (yes, really), Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has been bigging up Panther Lake, a next-gen CPU from Intel based on the company's upcoming 18A process node.

In a post on X, Gelsinger claims Panther Lake is up and running and has booted operating systems. The Intel CEO also says that it's slated to go into full production next year. Not a huge amount is known about Panther Lake, architecturally speaking. However, the new 18A process node it uses does bring two critical innovations mentioned by Gelsinger.

«Intel 18A has brought together two critical innovations to enable customers to make leaps in scale and power efficiency: RibbonFET gate-all-around and PowerVia backside power technology — an industry first for foundry customers,» Gelsinger said.

For the record, the 18A node is the final of the so-called five new nodes in four years touted by Gelsinger and Intel as part of the company's plan to regain technology leadership from rivals including Taiwanese chip-manufacturing colossus TSMC.

More specifically, the five nodes in four years kicked off with Intel 7, which was really a rebrand of Intel's troubled 10nm node. Intel 7 begat Intel 4, arguably the node previously known as 7nm with a modest Intel 3 revision, and Intel 20A following that and Intel 18A a revision thereof.

Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest, lead products on Intel 18A, are out of the fab, powered on, have booted operating systems, and are on track to start production next year. Additionally, Intel 18A has brought together two critical innovations to enable customers to make leaps…August 6, 2024

Keeping up? Anyway, it is indeed perhaps the most notable aspect of the new Panther Lake CPU family that it's built on an Intel process node at all. Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake laptop chip has been entirely farmed out to TSMC for manufacturing of its two active silicon tiles.

It's not yet entirely clear how Intel's next-gen desktop CPU, Arrow