A lot is riding on the success of Intel's next-generation compute platform unveiled yesterday, dubbed “Panther Lake,” and its next-gen process technology, 18A. Panther Lake is, on the client-compute side of things, a mobile chip platform first and foremost. Intel has classified Panther Lake as a refinement of two families of mobile CPU that came before: the energy-efficiency-minded "Lunar Lake" and the more performance-oriented “Arrow Lake,” which tends to appear in bigger, peppier machines, often paired with a discrete GPU. To sum things up, Intel maintains that Panther Lake merges Lunar Lake’s power efficiency and the compute-performance moxie of Arrow Lake-H, without compromising on either front. The chip will feature up to 16 next-generation Performance, Efficient, and Low-Power Efficient cores, an updated integrated Xe graphics tile, an updated neural processing unit (NPU), and a heap of AI-minded enhancements. Panther Lake will deliver a broad menu of chip variants for PC maker...