When we're treated to the annual deluge of laptop announcements at CES in January, chances are Intel's Panther Lake processors will be inside a lot of them. They'll probably show up in the top-end thin-and-light models, which tend to have the most cutting-edge integrated graphics and best NPU performance.

Panther Lake debuts Intel's 18A 2nm fab process in its consumer chips, and a switch to a smaller process generally results in performance gains and new, denser chip layouts. Basically, we should see an increase in power and power efficiency. For comparison, the Apple M4 and upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite are 3nm and AMD's Zen 5 is 4nm.

The 18A process also introduces a new transistor architecture, dubbed RibbonFET, which lays the groundwork for future generations of chips.

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