Intel Corp. today showcased a new class of Intel Core Ultra X9 and X7 processors, the first new chips built on its most advanced 18A manufacturing process.

Announced at the CES electronics trade show in Las Vegas, they’re the first chips to fall within its new 18A Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 lineup, and they’re going to be used by dozens of top personal computer makers, the company said. “We’ve been out there shaping what it means for fundamental computing,” Jim Johnson (pictured), Intel’s Client Computing Group senior vice president and general manager, said during a keynote at CES 2026.

The new chips represent a major milestone for Intel in its effort to rebuild its tattered reputation after falling behind rivals such as Nvidia Corp., with the company proclaiming them to be the most advanced processors ever manufactured in the U.S. More important, they’re the first chips to be built on Intel’s vaunted 18A process, which has taken several years to come to fruition.

The 18A process was a key plank of former Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger’s plan to restore the company to its former greatness in the chipmaking industry. But he couldn’t get the chips ready quickly enough to save his job and was deposed at the end of 2024.

The letter “A” is short for “angstrom,” which is a measurement that’s much smaller than the nanometers that are currently used to measure the size of transistors in chips. Eighteen angstroms is equivalent to about 1.8 nanometers, which means it’s more or less on a par with rival chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s N2 manufacturing process.

Intel uses a technology called RibbonFET gate-all-around to manage the electrical current in the chips, and PowerVia to enable backside power delivery. That combination helps the new chips achieve 15% superior performance-per-watt than its existing silicon.

At CES, Intel’s current CEO Lip Bu-Tan said the company is now ready to ramp up mass production on the 18A manufacturing process ahead of schedule. If the chips perform as well as expected, it could mark a turning point in the company’s fortunes.

Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3

Intel’s Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 chips see the company revert to the familiar terminology of performance cores, efficiency cores and low-power efficiency cores, or P-cores, E-cores and LP-cores. That was used with its Intel Core Ultra 100 chip, also known as Meteor Lake. The chips are paired with a neural processing unit that’s capable of delivering 50 tera operations per second, or TOPS, of artificial intelligence processing performance, as well as Intel’s Xe3 graphics processing units.

Johnson told the media during his CES presentation that Panther Lake’s single-threaded performance is about 10% higher than the company’s Lunar Lake chips while using the same power. It also provides more than 50% superior multithreaded performance compared with both Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake.

The Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 chips will be available in three different configurations, with an eight-core chip made up of four P-cores, four E-cores, four Xe3 GPU cores and four ray-tracing units, along with memory of 6,800 megatransfers per second LPDDR5x or 6,400 MT/s DDR5.

There’s also a 16-core chip made up of four P-cores, eight E-cores and four LP-cores, with four Xe3 GPU cores and four ray-tracing units and either 8,533 MTs/ LPDDR5x or 7,200 MT/s DDR5. Finally, there’s a second, more powerful 16-core option with four P-cores, eight E-cores, four LP-cores, 12 Xe3 GPU cores and 12 ray-tracing units, plus a 9,600 MT/s LPDDR5x memory interface.

Just as with Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Ryzen AI Max and Ryzen 9000X3D chip families, it’s the final 12Xe configuration that’s the most premium of the three, and that’s what laptop buyers will want to look out for. The GPU in question is the Intel Arc B390, and it will enable the Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 chips to deliver 73% better gaming performance, Intel said.

The Intel Arc B390 GPU also takes advantage of frame generation technology to accelerate frame rates and advance graphics performance. According to Johnson, it’s capable of rendering three AI-generated frames for every GPU-rendered frame.

Intel said the first laptops powered by the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips will launch globally by the end of this month. The company also teased plans to launch a handheld gaming platform based on the chips with partners such as Acer Inc. and Micro-Star International Co., Ltd., saying it will have more to say about this later in the year.

Photos: Intel