Intel unveiled the Core Ultra 300 “Panther Lake” CPUs last month, the new generation of chiplet-based mobile CPUs, also debuting the company’s 1.8nm process. Intel missed the back-to-school or autumn windows it preferred to launch the new generations in the past, with only a paper unveiling happening in October that didn’t even specify a release date. And only now do we finally have information on when they will actually hit the market.
While the models and parameters of the Panther Lake processors (including clock speeds), which you can find in this article, have only been surfaced unofficially through leaks, Intel has now revealed the launch date in an official manner. The company published an invitation to the event where the Core Ultra 300 processors will be launched—or “Core Ultra Series 3,” as stated in the invitation.
This event will take place on Monday, January 5, 2026, at 15:00 Pacific Time, which will be midnight on January 6 for us. It is now officially confirmed that Intel will not manage to release the 1.8nm processors this year, which is something the company most likely wanted to do, as the CPUs were originally intended to be a 2025 product. This has clearly been stated in previously shown official roadmaps, and the manufacturing process itself was originally planned to enter production before the end of 2024.
Declaring a manufacturing process as “production ready” doesn’t mean the simultaneous launch of processors, which always happens some months later, but it’s beyond debate that a significant delay has occurred. On the positive side, the process technology was apparently developped successfully, which is something that wasn’t achieved with the 10nm process for many years, for example. And the predecessor of this new technology (Intel 20A process) was cancelled by the company. The 18A process is meant to put the company back into the game in advanced chip manufacturing and make it a foundry business competitor to TSMC, so it’s extremely important not only for Intel but for the industry as a whole.
A live stream will broadcast the event, which you can watch on YouTube or the Intel website. We assume the event will be part of the CES 2026 trade show in Las Vegas, likely as one of the keynote presentations on its eve—the actual exhibition days are January 6–9.
The announcement on Intel’s website directly uses the word “launch,” which usually means it will be a real “hard launch”, where at least some laptops will start selling and be physically available. Intel would be playing with its already damaged reputation if it ultimately said that, in reality, we’d have to wait for another period.
However, at the beginning of January, there might not be a large quantity or wide selection of laptops with the new processors on the market, as information has long been leaking that Intel was pushing to launch Panther Lake as soon as possible, even if it meant limited availability at the moment of launch.
For example, it’s possible that higher-end processor models with maximum clock speeds may not be readily available initially, since yields might be poor for the SKUs (even though the maximum is only 5.1 GHz—a worse result than TSMC’s 3nm process achieves in Arrow Lake processors with a more or less identical architecture). But at least in some form, Panther Lake laptops should presumably be on shelves on that date, and we should hopefully see reviews coming out.
There will be no desktop models for the Core Ultra 300 generation. We’ve known for a while that Panther Lake is only coming to laptops (most likely due to those low clock speeds). The LGA 1851 platform will instead receive a refresh of the Core Ultra 200 processors.
Source: Intel
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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