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A (0:00)
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Welcome to the Techbrew Ride Home for Thursday, October 9, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, intel tries to punch its way back to relevancy with the release of Panther Lake, the first chip built on its 18 a process is cursor so successful it's about to rocket to a $30 billion valuation. Big raise for a US Deep Seq competitor and are we starting to get the first models moving beyond attention based architecture? Here's what you missed today. In the world of tech, when your business evolves, so does the risk of data loss. But with Veeam, your data is always on the map. Partner with Veeam for coverage that keeps you moving, and get protection for workloads of all shapes and sizes, even the ones you haven't created yet so you can stay resilient as you scale. With Veeam, it's all good. Get workload coverage that works for your business@veeam.com that's V E E A M.com Big positive news from intel today. For a change, intel this morning unveiled Panther Lake or Intel core Ultra Series 3, the first chip built on its 18A process coming to laptops and handhelds in late this year or early next year. Intel says 18A based Panther Lake chips can deliver 50% more performance at similar power to Lunar Lake chips. Intel CTO Sachin Khadi said 18A and Panther Lake are foundational to our future, and manufacturing is mission critical not just for intel, but for the United States. Quoting the Verge Panther Lake is the most important chip intel has made in years. It's the one that will tell the world if a smaller, more focused intel can still meet or beat the competition from Apple, AMD and Qualcomm. It's the first on Intel's 18A process, the one Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger claimed would right the ship and make Intel a manufacturing leader before he was unceremoniously shown the door last December. That's a lot riding on one piece of silicon when it arrives in late 2025 and early 2026. But what is Panther Lake, aka Intel Core Ultra Series 3 actually going to bring to a laptop or handheld near you? Well, more battery life, more performance, more gaming graphics, more affordability. That's the idea anyhow. Oh, and Panther Lake isn't just for thin and light machines. This time, intel has built three different flavors of this chip so it can replace both the lighter weight Lunar Lake and the heftier Aerolake H you find in more laptops. Right now, intel will sell eight and 16 core CPUs, each with four brand new XE3 graphics cores, as well as a 16 core CPU with 12 XE3 graphics cores and 12 ray tracing units, the most integrated graphics horsepower it's shipped to date and a preview of what might come if intel continues to ship desktop gaming GPUs. With the last generation, we gave you a dilemma, says intel chief CPU architect Stefan Robinson. You could buy a Lunar Lake and get fantastic battery life, or you could buy Arrow Lake that had more throughput. Now intel is trying to solve that dilemma, he tells me. Although Panther Lake abandons the onboard memory that helped make last year's Lunar Lake so efficient and adds the low power E cores that were holding Meteor Lake's battery life back, intel claims you'll actually see up to 10% lower power than Lunar Lake across the entire chip. And Robinson tells me that should genuinely mean better battery life than Lunar Lake. In real world use cases, including Microsoft Teams diving into theoretical workloads, the chips sound even more impressive. Intel's brand new Cougar Cove performance cores, P cores and Darkmont Efficiency cores or E cores on the 18A process let intel claim 40% lower power at similar single threaded performance or 50% more multithreaded performance at similar power, seemingly leaving Lunar Lake in the dust. Meanwhile, Intel's new graphics claim to offer over 50% more GPU power than their predecessors too, but it will depend on which of Intel's three new kinds of chips you're buying. Of course, while the top flight Panther Lake with 12 xe3 GPU cores might offer 50% more GPU power than the Lunar Lake chip with 8 xe2 GPU cores, it isn't yet clear to me how the new chips with just 4xe3 GPU cores might compare, or whether one might have a battery life advantage over another. That said, even the 12xz3 core variant shouldn't be too beefy to fit into a handheld like the MSI Claw 8. That surprised me. Last month, intel fellow Tom Peterson suggested as much on stage during Intel's architecture event, and when it does, it should have more stable performance because of a new intelligent bias control v3, which sends hints to Windows to offload gaming tasks to E cores instead of P cores so the system can divert that extra power to graphics where the games really need it. We're more heavily relying on our E cores for gaming because they're beefy E cores and that frees up more power for the gpu, robinson tells me. End quote. And intel really wants you to know that this is being made in the usa. Quoting Bloomberg intel executives explain the benefits of their latest offerings in presentations hosted near a new factory at its Osotillo site in Arizona. Known as Fab 52, the facility is the first to go into mass production with the 18A technique. Intel also is shouldering the costly burden of trying to update its factories. Fab 52 alone required more steel than the Eiffel Tower to build, and contains machines that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Over three days of presentations at the event, intel executives repeatedly asserted that 18A is the most advanced chip production technology developed and deployed in the US That Made in America spirit lines up with a Trump administration push to bolster domestic manufacturing and reduce reliance on factories in East Asia. The company can make 18A equipped for factories, pay for themselves by producing chips for its own needs, intel said. But the next phase, a technology called 14A, will require outside customers and a high volume of orders to be cost effective. Getting the new 18A chips to market in products that demonstrate better performance for consumers will be the first step toward re establishing Intel's credibility, according to Kevin O. Buckley, general manager of the company's foundry business. Don't trust us until we can do that, said the executive, who's tasked with persuading other companies, including rivals, to use its factories. We know we have a long way to go to deliver trust for our customers. End quote. Something, something My threshold for covering breach stories that I always tell you about. Discord estimates that 70,000 of its users government ID photos may have been exposed in a 1.5 terabyte data breach of third party customer service provider Zendesk, which happened on September 20. Quoting the Verge, a tweet by VX Underground said that the company was being extorted over a breach of its Zendesk instance by a group claiming to have 1.5 terabytes of age verification. Related Photos 2,185,151 Photos when we asked about the tweet, Discord spokesperson New Wexler shared this statement following last week's announcement about a security incident involving a third party customer service provider, we want to address inaccurate claims by those responsible for that are circulating online. First, as stated in our blog post, this was not a breach of Discord, but rather a third party service we used to support our customer service efforts. Second, the numbers being shared are incorrect and part of an attempt to extort a payment from Discord. Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government ID photos exposed which our vendor used to review age related appeals. Third, we will not reward those responsible for their illegal actions. All affected users globally have been contacted and we continue to work closely with law enforcement, data protection authorities and external security experts. End quote.