Intel has reached quite an important milestone today with its most advanced node — Intel 18A — which will be used for client CPUs (Panther Lake) and server CPUs (Clearwater Forest).
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The company has now confirmed both Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest have both left the lab and have been successfully turned on, booting into an operating system and hitting the important milestones in less than 6 months after they were taped out.
What does this mean? It means that the silicon development is on track, with Intel confident that production for Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest to start sometime in 2025. The new Intel 18A process node has also been deployed for an external customer, with the first chips for this customer to tape out in 2025 featuring RibbonFET and PowerVIA technologies (which are available to all customers).
Intel’s next-gen Panther Lake CPUs should arrive as the Core Ultra 300 series, as the Core Ultra 200 series “Arrow Lake” CPUs will be released later this year, and Core Ultra 200V series “Lunar Lake” series shortly after.
Panther Lake should feature up to 16 cores and up to 12 Xe3-GPU cores, and has been designed primarily for mobile devices, with no desktop Panther Lake CPUs expected. Dell is expected to first introduce Intel’s next-gen Panther Lake CPU architecture into its products sometime in 2026.
Gelsinger posted on X: “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 in scale and power efficiency: RibbonFET gate-all-around and PowerVia backside power technology – an industry first for foundry customers.“.
“I’m proud of the team’s progress. Intel Foundry will continue to fuel next-gen innovation for our customers and pave the way for the first systems foundry for the AI era“.