Intel's next-gen Panther Lake CPUs to be unveiled on October 9, as media attends Tech Tour 2025

Intel is currently hosting its Tech Tour 2025 event, with the media and analysts flying in for the huge Panther Lake CPU reveal, and much more from Team Blue.

Intel is allowing attendees of Tech Tour 2025 to confirm that they're on the ground, but they're under NDA to not post anything about what they see or find out. We know Intel is poised to unveil its next-gen Panther Lake CPUs, which are fabbed in-house on its new Intel 18A process node, with upgraded compute chiplets, and the debut of Xe3 "Celestial" GPU cores.

We've seen some things from the event, with a slide confirming the embargo dates, and that some of the attendees have been touring Intel's Ocotillo semiconductor facility and Fab 52, which is grinding away making chips on the new Intel 18A process node. We should expect to hear all about Intel's new 18A node and the next-gen Panther Lake and Xeon CPUs, on October 9.

Intel's next-gen Panther Lake CPUs will be laptop offerings, succeeding the current-gen Lunar Lake, and first-gen Meteor Lake CPUs. Just to be clear, Panther Lake is a mobile CPU and not a desktop CPU, as Intel will unveil the "Nova Lake" CPUs next year.

Nova Lake is rumored to be a bigger 52-core desktop processor with new bLLC cache acting as a competitor to X3D cache from AMD, and a new LGA 1954 socket. We'll see Intel release an Arrow Lake Refresh family of CPUs first, and then the new Core Ultra 400 series which should be Nova Lake, while Core Ultra 300 on desktop is Arrow Lake Refresh, in 2026.

Nova Lake will see Intel forcing a new LGA 1954 socket -- thus new motherboards -- onto consumers, so let's hope that the performance is there to not just beat AMD's current-gen Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 -- and their 9000X3D counterparts -- but AMD's next-gen Zen 6 processors and their X3D chips by then.