Intel Lunar Lake processors (officially called Intel Core Ultra Series 2) haven't been on the market for a full month, but we're already getting a look at the next generation with Panther Lake. Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger made an appearance at Lenovo Tech World this week, where he showed off the first Panther Lake chip.

The CEO didn't reveal much in the way of details, but it does signal that Intel's production process is in good health.

Panther Lake is based on Intel's 18A node

Gelsinger took the stage for about ten minutes at the Lenovo Tech World keynote, but the big revelation came right at the end, where he handed Lenovo's CEO the first ever sample of a Panther Lake chip, which will be hitting the market next year. Panther Lake should feature multiple upgrades across the board, but the big confirmed change right now is the manufacturing process, which is confirmed to be built on Intel's own 18A process node. This will be the first node that's part of the "Angstrom era", where nodes are measured in units even smaller than a nanometer.

The Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors are actually built on a TSMC N3B process, so Panther Lake is looking to be a return to Intel's in-house process nodes. That should be good news for a company whose investments in the foundry industry are taking some time to pay off, with reports of a potential acquisition by Qualcomm floating around. Intel had reportedly struggled to produce enough Meteor Lake chips for laptops, so hopefully things are looking up for the next generation.

What else can you expect from Panther Lake?

While Intel hasn't said much about the performance of Panther Lake overall, the company did talk up the NPU performance earlier this year. According to Intel, Panther Lake will double the NPU performance from Lunar Lake, which in itself already offers three times more performance than Meteor Lake. Lunar Lake is the company's first platform to support Copilot+ on Windows 11, and Panther Lake is looking to take that experience that much further.

Aside from that, all we have is speculation. Panther Lake chips are rumored to come with new performance cores based on the Cougar Cove architecture, along with Skymont efficient cores. The GPU is also expected to get an upgrade, since it will be based on the new Xe3 architecture, instead of the Xe2 GPUs found inside Lunar Lake chips.

Regardless, it will be a while before you see these chips. Intel has released two generations of processors within less than a year, but you shouldn't expect that cadence to be kept up. For now, we've been very impressed by Lunar Lake processors in laptops like the Dell XPS 13.