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- Device manufacturers testing Intel’s Panther Lake CPUs are reporting major problems.
- The issues include poor silicon quality, low power efficiency, and failure to meet performance targets.
- Because of these problems, some manufacturers do not plan to fully replace the older Lunar Lake chips with the new ones.
Intel’s new product, set to make its debut later this year in a high-profile presentation, is drawing criticism from all of the players who currently have CPUs in their hands. OEMs are currently performing internal testing with the architecture, and unfortunately for the blues, things aren’t looking good, especially given the hundreds of layoffs.
The design and development teams for this architecture must be working long hours because the messages from their partners are not positive. They are now openly admitting that Panther Lake has a variety of issues, including silicon, efficiency, speed, and drivers, among others.
The OEMs suggest that the “Pathetic Lake” title appears to fit Intel perfectly, until they address the present mess the design is causing. Partners are dissatisfied, and some believe the new architecture will not totally replace Lunar Lake due to the numerous negative impacts.
The claims made by a few Intel OEM partners in an anonymous conversation with the world’s largest leaker are astonishing. Two OEM industry sources provide proof of this:
Source 1: Apparently, Intel’s partners are having a lot of issues with the NPUs on Intel APUs right now. The Celestial drivers are in worse shape than the Lunar Lake Battlemage drivers were a few months before launch, and virtually all performance targets have been missed.
We’ve talked about everything from efficiency, memory speed support, CPU performance, and even silicon quality. The only redeeming feature is that the iGPU is powerful… when it doesn’t crash.
In fact, one OEM confessed to me that they’re not even sure PNL (Panther Lake) can fully replace LNL (Lunar Lake) in their lineup.
Source 2: As a major OEM, we definitely won’t be able to replace Lunar Lake with Panther Lake next year. Honestly, it seems like this could be another case like Meteor Lake, and while it might not be the worst-case scenario, I think AMD will easily dominate the CPU market until at least the end of 2026.
There is further information that confirms the situation, which is significant. The leak mentions major issues with the new NPU 5, which will debut in the architecture as a whole, but one section in particular appears to be quite chaotic.
This is the software, which is sometimes labelled as “garbage.” The problem is massive, as no OEM partner has been able to get half of the items operating consistently, and they have been unable to get the NPU to perform as promised. If this was an issue with the Lunar Lake 4 NPUs, it appears to have gotten worse with Panther Lake.
With only two and a half months till launch, Panther Lake has major silicon issues, particularly with IMC and voltage controller management in the cores, which degrades core and memory efficiency and speed. When combined with the awful drivers, the situation appears to be absolute mayhem.
LPDDR5X is believed to be around 8,000 MT/s, which is far from the original aim. For all of these reasons, AMD Gorgon Point, Strix Point’s immediate successor in the laptop CPU architectural industry, is expected to dominate the market in 2026, despite a very limited Refresh.
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