Why Intel Jumped 26% in January

The January surge was each the much awesome considering Intel had already rallied 84% successful 2025. Yet, whereas the 2025 surge mostly reflected a alteration successful sentiment amid the assignment of caller CEO Lip-Bu Tan and investments successful the institution from the U.S. government, Nvidia, and Softbank, January's surge was based connected the merchandise of an existent caller product: Intel's Panther Lake CPU.

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As Intel's archetypal product-to-market built connected its caller 18A node, connected which erstwhile CEO Pat Gelsinger said helium "bet the company," Intel had to "stick the landing" with Panther Lake's release, truthful to speak. Fortunately, aboriginal reviews of Panther Lake-based laptops amusement Intel has done precisely that.

Five years ago, erstwhile CEO Pat Gelsinger embarked connected an ambitious "five nodes successful 4 years" program to bring Intel's manufacturing backmost to parity with, oregon adjacent up of, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE: TSM).

That "fifth" and last node of the modulation was 18A, which features not lone a caller gate-all-around transistor called RibbonFET, but besides backside powerfulness delivery, successful which the powerfulness proviso web is moved to the underside of the silicon, leaving much country for transistors connected the beforehand of the chip. It's besides imaginable that 18A utilizes caller high-NA EUV lithography exertion for immoderate of its layers, though that hasn't been officially disclosed. Of note, TSMC's 2nm exertion does not utilize backside powerfulness delivery, nor does it usage high-NA EUV.

And portion galore were optimistic 18A would execute its goal, skeptics surely had their reasons, fixed Intel's way grounds implicit the past decade.

Yet erstwhile Intel formally introduced Panther Lake chips astatine the CES successful aboriginal January, exertion enthusiasts came away, well, enthusiastic. In particular, reviewers touted:

• Excellent integrated graphics: PCWorld tested Intel's Core Ultra x9 388H spot (one of the respective Panther Lake SKUs) with Intel's integrated Arc B390 chiplet. According to the reviewer, the caller Panther Lake/Arc operation easy bushed competitors Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) and Qualcomm integrated laptop configurations for gaming by a wide margin.

• Excellent Battery life: In the aforesaid PCWorld review, the Panther Lake laptop's artillery beingness was besides the champion the reviewers had ever seen, lasting 22 hours portion playing 4K video and 14 hours portion simulating bureau work.

• Impressive performance: While Panther has succeeded with artillery life, it besides sports astir 50% higher multi-threaded show than Intel's Lunar Lake chip, which is Intel's anterior procreation low-power laptop spot that's really manufactured astatine TSMC.

• AI inference: For artificial quality tasks that tin beryllium done wholly on-device, Panther Lake's neural processing portion (NPU) sports 50 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second), different 120 TOPS successful the Xe GPU, and different 10 connected the CPU for 180 full TOPS, 50% higher than Lunar Lake's 120 TOPS.