Intel’s next-generation Panther Lake laptop chips could be a return to form

They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but the press that Intel has generated in the last year has certainly been testing the boundaries of the aphorism.

Is it good when your company posts an annual loss for the first time in almost 40 years? When you're doing multiple rounds of mass layoffs? When your board pushes your CEO into leaving, and starts arguing with the new CEO about major strategy decisions almost immediately? When you're either losing or failing to gain market share in areas critical to your bottom line? When you need to explain to the president why your CEO should keep his job, and then explain to investors the many possible downsides of a mercurial president deciding he wants a stake in your company?

I feel like the answer to these questions is "mostly no." Even Intel's recent investment from and partnership with Nvidia came with a tacit admission that Intel was mostly failing to make a dent in AI hardware and software and the gaming and workstation GPU markets. (Reports that Intel could start manufacturing chips for AMD would be good news, as bizarre as that arrangement would have been at any other point in the two companies' history with one another, but those talks could still fall apart.)

But before it was a company that primarily manufactured bad news, Intel was mainly known for making and selling computer processors. And Intel is hearkening back to that heritage today by taking the wraps off of a new series of chips, codenamed Panther Lake, that will form the basis of its next-generation Core Ultra laptop CPU lineup.