Despite the storm, the American processor giant is holding firm and counting on its next ranges to get back into the race.
While competition from AMD is increasingly strong in all CPU segments, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (or TSMC) is now - quite clearly - number one in semiconductor production, Intel finds itself in an unusual position for a company that has been the absolute leader in microprocessors for over thirty years: that of outsider.
At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, Intel announced its intentions for the end of this year and, more importantly, for the whole of next year. The strategy has already been spelled out, and there seems to be no question of deviating from it one millimetre. In a nutshell, Intel plans to forge ahead and perfect its various technologies in order, step by step, to win back the trust of users for the CPU part, and of manufacturers for everything to do with semiconductor production.
Intel presents its next-generation CPU, Panther Lake © Intel
At the end of the year, Intel will launch the first reference of its Panther Lake chips for notebooks. Panther Lake will be etched according to the Intel 18A node, and mass production will start early next year. Also in the first half of 2026, Intel intends to offer something new for the desktop CPU market with Arrow Lake Refresh. This intermediate generation will above all be an opportunity to optimize the Core Ultra 200s that Intel launched last autumn.
The real novelty, the major novelty for Intel, will wait until the end of 2026 and even the beginning of 2027, as John Pitzer, Intel SVP of Corporate Relations, explains: " And then we'll conclude with Nova Lake, which we'll launch at the end of next year, and continue into 2027 ". Nova Lake is the first generation of processors that Intel will burn using the Intel 14A node. The aim here is to offer laptop and desktop processors on the same architecture and, above all, to prove to the world that Intel is capable of etching semiconductors as precisely, as finely and as efficiently as TSMC. To be continued!
