By Max A. Cherney
Jan 5 (Reuters) – Intel is set to launch Panther Lake, its new AI chip for laptops, on Monday at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, as the company seeks to reassure investors about the first product made using its next-generation manufacturing process called 18A.
Jim Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC group, is expected to give details about the chip in a presentation starting at 6 p.m. EST (2300 GMT). The new chips feature a new transistor design and way to deliver power to the chip.
Intel’s prior-generation Lunar Lake chips were largely made by TSMC. The stakes for Intel are high – the company is making its first high-volume product with 18A, and hopes to reclaim market share it has lost to Advanced Micro Devices.
The company said in October that graphics and central processors integrated in Panther Lake deliver 50% faster performance than its previous generation of chips, Lunar Lake.
Intel has struggled with the yield, or the number of good chips per silicon wafer, for the Panther Lake processors, Reuters reported last year. Intel executives have said its yields are improving monthly and will pave the way for the launch this year.
For its part, AMD plans to give a CES keynote address at 9:30 p.m. EST (0230 GMT on Tuesday). CEO Lisa Su will likely launch new generations of PC chips that are geared for AI and graphics.
AMD announced a multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI for its next-generation MI400 chips, some of which the companies plan to deploy this year. The deal with the ChatGPT maker is expected to generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the chip designer.
The CEO of AI chip leader Nvidia, Jensen Huang, will also speak at CES on Monday.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
