Intel held its Q4 earnings call for 2024 yesterday with its two interim co-CEOs, who replaced former CEO Pat Gelsinger late last year. The co-CEOs pointed to the second half of 2025 for the launch of Intel’s Panther Lake processors for laptops and other mobile devices and confirmed that Nova Lake desktop chips will launch in 2026. They also noted that Intel’s foundry won’t be the only one to make Nova Lake chips. Although Intel hasn’t indicated who will help produce the processors, the obvious choice is TSMC, which already partners with Intel for Arrow Lake chips.
The Intel CEOs provided little in the way of new information but confirmed that it will use the 18A process for Panther Lake and fabricate most of those chips using its own fab. That will mark the end of Gelsinger’s plan, which called for five nodes in four years. They said little about Nova Lake, even though speculation about it has been swirling recently, but they confirmed that 2026 will see it launch.
Credit: Intel Foundry
Intel’s co-CEOs are Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who is also CEO of Intel Products, and David Zinsner, who is also CFO of Intel. During his tenure as CEO, Gelsinger appeared to view Intel’s fabrication plants as being critical to the company’s success. Intel invested heavily in a multi-billion dollar mega fab in Ohio that remains under construction. Under his supervision, Intel won billions of dollars in grants and loans from the US government’s CHIPS Act. But TSMC’s founder appeared to suggest that Gelsinger’s statements about TSMC cost it a discount on chip production. CHIPS Act funding was slow to arrive, and the business is looking at a long road to profitability. Now Gelsinger is out, and Intel’s new leaders have struck a somewhat different tone about Intel’s chip fabrication business, as PCWorld points out.
“As CEO of Intel Product, I will always make process technology decisions based on what is best for my customers,” Holthaus said.” And Intel Foundry will need to earn my business every day, just as I need to earn the business of my customers.”
Intel Foundry, for its part, had an encouraging fourth quarter. The business earned $4.5 billion in revenue and had an operating loss of $2.3 billion, which is the lowest loss for the foundry all year. The third quarter of 2024 saw Intel Foundry lose $5.8 billion, making its Q4 loss all the more dramatic of a positive change.
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source: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/intel-panther-lake-and-nova-lake-on-track-for-2025-and-2026
