Intel Packages Up Its Future in Panther Lake - DTNS 5122

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 9th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know. We follow up on context. We do our darndest to help each other understand. And today, Intel has new chips, but will this put the company on the road to recovery? And Andy Beach tells us about the fight to keep the web working amidst increased AI bots. I am human Tom Merritt. I am also human Jen Cutter. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. All right. I know chips aren't everybody's thing, but this is the big story today. And a lot's riding on it for Intel. And Intel has been a huge part of the tech sector for a long time.

0:46So I'm going to do my best to balance giving you chip enthusiasts the information you need to know while also keeping it understandable for everybody. The top line here is that Intel announced details for its Core Ultra Series 3 processors. You might hear these referred to as Core Ultra 300 at some point. You're probably mostly going to hear them referred to as Panther Lake. That's a lake in Snohomish County. Intel just names all of their code names after lakes. So this is Panther Lake. Panther Lake will be the first chip series manufactured on Intel's 18A process. And of course, as you might've guessed from the name 18A, that's a process comparable to two nanometers.

1:30I'm kidding. I don't know why they call it 18A. It's not exactly two nanometers, but it has performance increases similar to two nanometers. Anyway, the bigger deal here is they are producing it at the Fab 52 plant in Arizona. So this is the first big chip to come out of their US domestic manufacturing capacity. All right, let's get to the chips. Panther Lake chips all get the same package design. That's a big deal because Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake did not all have the same package design across the board. Since Panther Lake system on chips are built from the same performance core throughout the series, that one's called Cougar Cove.

2:14If you hear Cougar Cove, that's the performance core. The same efficiency core, that's the one that's not as powerful, but you use it for low powered needs and it uses less power. That one's called Darkmont. That's the efficiency core. And then the same GPU core, that's the Z3 integrated GPU core. So same performance core, same efficiency core, same GPU core across the series. That means you get the power efficiency that came with Lunar Lake and the performance scalability that came with Arrow Lake all in Panther Lake. There are just three variants, nice and simple. There's an eight core version that has four GPU cores.

2:52That's probably meant for workhorse ultra portable laptops. There's a 16 core version with four GPU cores and extra PCI express lanes. That seems right for your bulkier workstations, or if you're going to get a gaming laptop with an external GPU and you want those extra CPU cores. And then there's the 16 core version with 12 GPU cores. That seems a fit for high-end thinning lights that don't have a dedicated GPU. So you want more GPU cores integrated. Intel is making the CPU and the GPU tiles in the package. In Arizona, TSMC is making the platform controller tile that handles all your IO, your USB, and most of that kind of stuff.

3:35And the platform controller is a big part to this. So people are arguing about how much of this chip is really being made in Arizona. But what you care about is, is this chip better? If I buy a laptop with this chip, what am I going to get? Well, you're going to get 10 % improvement on single core performance over Lunar Lake, 50 % improvement on multi-core performance over both Lunar and Arrow Lake. And Intel says the chip consumes 10 % less power than Lunar Lake and 40 % less power than Arrow Lake. So longer battery life, better performance. You also can support up to 96 gigabytes of memory and up to 180 tops.

4:12So those of you who do a lot of AI stuff, you're going to want to know that tops number. It's a good tops number. Expect to see these in laptops. Possibly we will get desktop variants of Panther Lake later after the first of the year. I'm guessing we're going to see a ton of laptops at CES 2026 that are having Panther Lake in them and probably get desktop announcements around that same time. Now, warning, this next little bit is an oversimplification if you're into chip architecture, but it's enough for people who are curious to get the gist of what's going on without insulting actual chip heads intelligence.

4:48Intel has delayed using its 18A process as it worked out issues with ribbon FET. Ribbon FET is a gate all around transistor, and that literally means it wraps all the way around the channel, unlike the previous FinFET, which didn't quite reach the bottom of the channel. Ribbon FET reduces power leakage when the chip is off. So there's less wasted energy also when it's on. That means you get improved performance and better energy efficiency. And there's also the PowerVia system, which delivers reliable backside power delivery to the chip. That reduces power loss over the previous way of putting the wires above the transistors.

5:28Okay. So just another long way of saying more powerful, more power efficient. Intel's also making its Xeon 6 Plus data center processor on the 18A process. If you're into data centers, that's good to know. And the total rubber meets the robe is like, great, when can I get these? Core Ultra Series 3 chips go into high volume production soon, before the end of the year. They will ship before the end of the year. You might see a laptop with Panther Lake in it before the end of the year, but Intel says broad market availability will start in January. There's a lot going on right there. Is this enough to save Intel's bacon?

6:08Uh, right. They, they got, they reduced the confusion now. So you've got clear, uh, chips that, that you don't have to go wait, which one's Arrow Lake and which one's Lunar Lake? Uh, you're, you're just going to go Panther Lake. It's better. Great. That's the laptop I want. And the, you know, the, the real tale of the tape will be when you get these things benchmarked and people put them through their paces and find out, are they reliable? Which was another complaint about previous Intel chips. So there's a lot of questions here. Yeah, no, there's a lot of reliability going on. I was helping a friend build a PC and I went to our good friend, Roger Chang, and I was like, Roger, I know you told me that there is this one chip that I should absolutely warn people away from.

6:47Is that still a problem for this particular work case? And he gave me a list and I gave that list to my friend to help sort that out. and I'm going to need a new computer next year. I've been putting it off and putting it off and then I bought a Switch. So next year I will have the money to build a PC. So it's nice to know that this stuff is coming. I am someone who does a lot of video work. So I want, I don't care about the AI side of things, but I want to have the best possible threading and such. But Tom, for your usage, is something like this appealing to you for your laptop, for your travel?

7:22Does this improve your life in any way? if you got one of these fancy new things? Yeah, that is the question, right? Because I still think the M series chips are probably a better bet, but that puts you on Mac OS. Now, personally, I don't care. Mac, Windows, whatever. Is it the best computer? That's what I want. But if you are like, no, I work in Windows. I have to stay in Windows. This is promising. We'll see what AMD responds with. I'm sure they'll respond with something good. They could respond with something better. Then you've got Qualcomm in the game, depending on your use to say like, well, listen, Tom, if you're getting an M series chip in a MacBook for all of your high level, you know, video editing and everything, you just need a thin and light for your Windows.

8:05Go with a Qualcomm chip. It can run Windows. It can run all your Windows apps. It can do everything you need to do. And it's going to be much cheaper and more power efficient. So there's a lot of compelling options out there. Yeah, I love this having options thing. But is it the best option? It's going to depend on the implementation. Yeah, looking forward to the benchmarks. And when people smarter than me on DTNS, break those benchmarks down for us. It saves me a lot of work. Yeah, exactly. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to D-Laser, Brad, and Kevin Morgan.

8:43All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. The browser company, makers of the Arc browser, announced that its more AI-focused Dia browser is now available to all users on macOS for free. We knew this was coming, but there's a few more details. You will need macOS 14 or later and an M1 chip or later, and you get chat on any tab, custom skills, mentioning tabs in any query, adding attachment to queries, and personalizing with memory all for free. But there is a rate limit. You can pay$20 a month to lift that limit. I think that makes sense. I know people are still sore that they're not making new versions of the ARC browser and they're pushing everyone to Dia, especially when Dia wasn't generally available.

9:31Now it's generally available and you can do everything with it. And the fact that all the features are available for free makes perfect sense to me because what they want is you to use it, find out you love it, then hit that rate limit and like, oh, I'm using it so much, it's worth$20 a month for me to pay for it. That's a reasonable way to monetize your product to me. Yeah. And also like, you know what you're getting when you're downloading that. You're downloading that specifically. Whereas I woke up to a text of my friend saying, yeah, Firefox is pushing this AI chat thing. How do I get rid of it?

10:03Do I need a flag? Do I need to do something? And I was like, oh, I'll get back to you after work. Yeah, Firefox hasn't pushed anything like that on me. That's interesting. Interesting. Discord said it will not pay the malicious actors who claim to have accessed customer support information from a third-party support system. The attackers say it was Zendesk. Bleeping Computer says it was Zendesk, so I think it's probably fair to say it's probably Zendesk. Discord also disclosed that the government ID images of 70 ,000 users were accessed in the attack. The attackers had claimed a much higher number.

10:37They still do. Discord's saying, no, we've analyzed it. It's 70 ,000, which not great, but that's less than the millions that they were talking about. The reason they had those images in that customer support system was for age verification. When Discord age gates certain features, they sometimes will ask for an ID to prove that you are 18 or older. The attackers told Bleeping Computer that they accessed the data through the compromised account of a support agent that was employed from another outsourced company. So basically Discord outsourced customer support to a company that then used Zendesk to access the data.

11:16And that's how they got into it. The attackers also accessed email addresses, usernames, IDs, phone numbers, partial payment information, date of birth, multi-factor authentication related information. I'm guessing that means type. Was it SMS? Was it an app? Was at a dongle, that kind of stuff, but not the actual multi-factor numbers. Also some things like suspicious activity levels and other internal information. This is not great, especially because no one likes their ID image being out there. That's bad. It's not as bad as actual passwords, actual financial information, or actual multi-factor information.

11:57So your mileage may vary how much you want to freak out about this, but not great, Bob. I know that Discord had specifically informed people whose government ID was in the breach in the breach email. I don't know anyone who has been hit by that, but 404 Media mentioned that there were some Canadians and Americans who did have their ID revealed. And that prompted the question, wait, why would a Canadian or American need to verify their age? But I wonder if that's just because they were working in the UK and just got hit in that dragnet saying, oh, yeah, no, we're still going to make sure if you're of age while you're overseas.

12:31Yeah, sure. No, absolutely. It could be that or it could be there's all these other age gating things happening here and there that they could have been used for. I understand that I would not like it if my driver's license image was out there. On the other hand, there's not much on your driver's license that couldn't be obtained other ways. And, you know, yes, it's your official image. The biggest concern is fraud, right? Taking these images and then creating physical driver's license to pretend to be you, that is a potential vector here. It's also not stuff you can easily just change like a password, you know, because it's associated with your ID.

13:14So it's bad. Um, it's, it's probably not as bad as some people are thinking. Um, but it, I think the thing that makes it so disturbing is that there's not much you can do about it. Like, yeah, you can go get a new ID, but that doesn't really end some of the fraud vectors that could be used for it. Yeah. I was trying to think of like, okay, what do I remember that was like specific to somebody having their picture ID used? And it was actually used in Toronto specifically for rental scams. that somebody would advertise a place, too good to be true, rent too good to be true. And then they're like, oh, and here's my passport to show him a real person.

13:50Here's my driver license to show a real person. And then of course, if you reverse image search that thing, you find out, oh boy, this guy has a lot of houses he's selling all of a sudden. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or they could use it to get around age gating stuff, you know, for an underage person. They could sell it to underage people to use for getting around age gating stuff because they have all of this other associated stuff. So it's definitely a vector for identity theft. Another thing that you would want to go, you know, if you were involved in this, you're one of the 70 ,000 people, you want to go lock down your identity.

14:24So yeah. Logitech pop switches, which went on sale way back in August, 2016, let you program up to three actions to happen when you press the button. Logitech says it will stop supporting the pop switches, making them inoperable starting October 15th, which is not a lot of time. Logitech is giving affected customers a 15 % off coupon good until March 31st in the US. Yeah. Logitech's kind of pulling out of the smart home business a little bit here. So that's odd. um i understand where they don't want to continue to operate a cloud service for this uh i hope there's a way someone can provide local access to keep these operable for for those who want to do the work um but it was nine years ago you know i know like it was and my brain's like oh but like just just i mean give people the code president it's like people who bought these things are also we don't know what the user base is for this this may end up affecting six people That's true.

15:30Like how many people actually continue to use these switches? That's one of the reasons products go out of support often is because you can't get people, you don't have enough people using them to make it worthwhile because you can't provide other services for them. 50 % off coupons, kind of chintzy though. Yeah. Thursday, Apple announced changes it will make to comply with a Texas law on age verification. Speaking of, that law goes into effect January 1st, requires the OS makers to confirm if a user is 18 or older and requires those younger than 18 to join a family sharing group managed by a parent or guardian.

16:07So this is iOS, Android, you need to manage this. Apple already operates a declared age range API to help developers target their apps appropriately by content for their own reasons. Like I'm making a, you know, adults only app and I don't want children to use it just to be good citizens. Apple will update that API to include the Texas mandated age ranges. That way a developer doesn't have to know anything about you other than you're older than 18 or you're younger than 18. They don't have to know your exact age. But Apple will. And Apple has pointed out like that does open up vectors for privacy violations.

16:46Apple will also add new APIs later this year that will let developers get parental consent if the app age rating changes. So right now, if the app age rating changes, it would just drop out. They want to provide a way for the developer to ping the parents, say, hey, we're changing the age rating. Do you want to allow your child to use it or leave it as no? There's going to be so many forks coming up, isn't there? like companies trying to comply with U.S. state-specific privacy changes versus the EU's laws versus whatever Oceania comes up with, possibly versus whatever Canada decides to align themselves with.

17:26That is often the way with new technologies. You know, you just get a patchwork of stuff until finally, you know, down the road, who knows how long everybody starts to settle on a compromised position and harmonize everything. But it's going to be a while before that happens. At the Bloomberg Screen Time Conference in Los Angeles, Netflix announced party games you can play on your TV coming to Netflix before the holidays, just in case you really want to start some fights, because you will have existing Netflix subscribers able to play Lego Party, Boggle Party, Pictionary Game Night, Tetris Time Warp, and Party Crashers Fool Your Friends.

18:04Participants scan a QR code from the TV screen with their phone, which will then become a controller for the game. The games will launch on select platforms like Roku in certain countries, which were not yet announced. So, yeah, I'm just thinking like the way my hockey team plays Pictionary. Boy, I hope other families are a lot more chill about this sort of thing. Yeah. The first thing I thought was like, oh, Christmas, Thanksgiving. We often are the hosts. Get people together. You got kids in the group. Totally, you know, totally be a fun thing. I'm not sure which one. It'll more be like, which one do y 'all want to play?

18:39but I bet we end up because we end up playing kind of these these sorts of games anyway I know we've done Jackbox and stuff like that before. Jackbox is like my first thought like all of those things because those are like you can also be like cooperative with that so I haven't played Lego Party but I'm just thinking like this is why Nintendo stays out if you want to buy it so now with your Netflix subscription you can just have it that's that's pretty cool. China's Commerce Ministry said on Thursday that it has added five more rare earth elements to its export control list in order to safeguard national security.

19:13That list now has 12 rare earth elements on it. Organizations must apply for a license if they want to export any one of those 12 minerals. Licenses will not be granted if it's going to a defense use outside of China. If it's going to a semiconductor use, then it'll depend on the circumstances. In other words, I don't know, is the U.S. involved? Then maybe not. There are license exemptions for humanitarian aid, public health emergencies, and disaster relief. At an event on Wednesday, Microsoft announced new features coming to OneDrive. A co-pilot icon will appear in the right corner of the page on the OneDrive web app.

19:53A link to a shared file can have different permissions for different users without changing the link. A photos tab includes a gallery view and editing features. And you can also find photos, build albums, and share them both through natural language prompts. Other new features include a custom agent for folders, smarter search, and more. A new OneDrive app with these features is coming next year. Yeah, I mean, I don't use OneDrive that much. I do have a few things in there and I use it for certain things. Obviously, I have Microsoft Office 365 or Microsoft 365, I guess is what it's called. So I use it for that.

20:29But the photo stuff in there is pretty compelling. I sort of like, like, oh, it'd be nice to just have everything in a tab like that. Yeah, because I don't mind Microsoft Photos on Windows, though. For OneDrive, I use it to back up specific things, and I mostly use it on my phone. So I'll see more of this when I, because like, it's just the easiest way for me who does not have a Mac to move stuff from my phone to my Windows PC. Speaking of a patchwork of laws, the governor of California signed a bill into law that requires browsers to let users opt out of all third party tracking with a single setting.

20:59California already had a law that said each site had to do this. Now it's like we just want you to be able to do it in the browser for everybody if you want. All major browsers do offer a one click opt out for third party data sharing. But it's unclear if it's actually universal across all sites or not. And so we'll watch and see what the browser companies do to comply with this law in California. Security researcher Victor Markopoulos from Firetail tested several LLM services for vulnerability to ASCII smuggling. This is when a malicious message contains special characters from the tags Unicode block that can't be seen by the user, but are read by the LLM.

21:41It can be used to prompt the LLM to deliver false information, like directing the user to a malicious website, of course. ChatGPT, Copilot, and Cloud are not vulnerable to such attacks. Grok, DeepSeek, and Gemini are. The researcher contacted Google on September 18th about the vulnerability, but Google does not consider it a security bug, but more of a social engineering attack. Oh, this sounds like a departmental issue. Like, not my problem. We only focus on the non-social engineering stuff. You need to talk to Janine over in the Department of Preventing Social Engineering Attacks. That's Google bureaucracy speaking, if you ask me.

22:22And this is me thinking, no, no, no. How about you verify your inputs? Clean that table. I mean, the fact that you've got Chad GPT Copilot and Claude all saying, yep, no, we cracked down on that and are doing our best to prevent it means that Gemini could. And they probably should. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper. There's a battle inside the Internet Engineering Task Force that could reshape how the web works in the age of AI. We have got Andy Beach to help explain. Andy, thanks for joining us again. Hey, Tom. Good to see you as always. I love it when we can talk IETF stuff.

22:59Oh, there's nothing like a good standards debate to bring everything together. Yeah, yeah. And these are needed because we have two big, well-known efforts to figure out how to separate what should get scraped and what shouldn't for AI training purposes. But it's not the only one. So there's Cloudflare. There's others. What's the IETF doing? Yeah, so the IETF is one of the standards bodies out there. They have a new standard that has been drafted. And you're absolutely right. Like this is sort of the level of engagement that we really need. What they are trying to do is separate out specifically search engine answers from AI answers when you're using the web as a starting point.

23:48That doesn't sound easy because you're sort of trying to figure out the intention of a machine. What does it look like they're trying to use as a definition for those? Well, where they're trying to go is effectively, and there are actually a number of stories in this space around this, but this is from the standard side. They're really trying to take and say that just scraping a website and then not visiting it, but returning a result is not a practical answer. It is not the way they want this to work. they would allow AI bots to be blocked, but it would still allow for traditional search crawlers to provide an answer.

24:28So in other words, I wouldn't be able to go get that Gemini summary at the top of my Google browser the same way, but I could still do a search and it would return a bunch of results that I could click through to, to get to the same answer. Let's use Google because they're the biggest and they're the easiest one for people to wrap their heads around. Google can come to my site and there would be a mechanism for me to say, you can scrape my site for search results, as long as that's a link that someone can click to come back to my site. But you cannot use what you're scraping for AI results. In other words, an AI overview that somebody can read and never have to go to my site.

25:05Yes, that is generally the direction that it's going. That's the idea. The idea, the one caveat is they are actually carving out for Google the overviews only because they are still getting a click through response as part of that result in some way. Okay. So where this wouldn't be used is inside of Claude, GPT, others that are going. Or the Gemini app that's not AI. Right. You have to be in browser. You have to be using it in order to get to these. And part of this is to, you know, there's a couple of different reasons, but the primary one is that a lot of websites and particularly journalists are starting to see massive drops in the people visiting their sites because the overviews are providing enough information for most people to get what they want without going through and seeing the remainder of the information.

25:58How can you tell, how can you verify, how can you hold to account the scraper that says, I'm using this for search, that it won't get used to train a chatbot? Yeah. I mean, great question. That is probably going to be twofold. There's probably some mechanisms in place for the level of detail that it allows to get. But then it's really going to come down to the business relationship that likely exists between the model making company and the companies that are involved in this. And there will be, you know, there will be language in the standard that involves the strict coherence to the ruling. So Internet Engineering Task Force has been around forever.

26:44It is well respected. It's just setting the rules. It's not enforcing the rules. Correct. Which is normal, by the way, for the IETM. Yeah, but a lot of times, you know, until these like standards are super important at the end of the day, even though we tend to not always, you know, apply them. But it is a starting point that everybody can agree on. And the more the more that we agree on it, the more interoperability we generally see across a wide range of things. And so that's why I'm I'm an advocate and fan of seeing this. I agree, we need more of this in place. And we've had a lot of lack of standards around AI to date, which has been some of the chaos that we feel in the way that it's implemented, because it's really just up to every company that's involved in it, whether it's a model maker or a media company who has a bunch of content online as to how they want to try and deal with it.

27:34And if we get these sort of mutual agreements in the form of a standard in place, it becomes a way that we can sort of move the industry forward a little bit. Yeah, because, and I think if people are having a hard time wrapping their head around this, a site could just block Google or DuckDuckGo or anybody else altogether and just say, you can't scrape me at all. But that is going to hurt the site because then it doesn't show up in the search results. So this is a way for the sites to be able to say, we're okay with you doing this. And if you're okay with the scraping for the chatbots too, you can say that.

28:06But usually the problem case is, I'm okay with you doing it for search. I'm not okay with it for the chat bot. How do I signal that in a way that everyone recognizes? And that sounds like what the IETF is doing is like, we'll make it so that it's clear. And everybody knows if someone goes afoul of that, you can just block them all together, right? You have the enforcement power on your own. Yeah, exactly. It gives a little granularity to something. And again, like when the original search crawler pieces were defined, AI wasn't an issue. So It didn't exist. And so now this is an update to it, which is a very common practice.

28:42Yeah. In other words, it's basically a stop sign, right? And we need two kinds of stop signs now. One kind of stop sign won't do. So that's great. It's in some ways less than it sounds like, because you've got Cloudflare and others out there doing these very technical ways of checking and detecting and enforcing and all of that. And there's still a place for that. This would be an easier way to define things that Cloudflare or others could take advantage of, I think. Yeah. And, you know, Cloudflare did a great job of taking an early stance of trying to make for their customers the ability to make them feel like their intellectual property was a little more safeguarded online.

29:23What this does is it puts a little weight behind the actions that Cloudflare had already done so that AI companies don't have a legal recourse. There was a possibility that an AI model company could have gone and tried to sue Cloudflare to say that they were blocking them from freely accessing websites for reasons that were allowed, this is starting to put some standards and guidelines into place to say that there might be reasons to block you. Well, Andy, thanks as always for helping us understand this. Where can folks find more of what you do? Yeah, thanks as always. So I write about media technology and AI colliding together over at Engines of AI.

30:03engines of change.ai. All right. Thanks, man. Thank you, sir. I like a good standard. Yes. It's huge for people who aren't on Cloudflare to be able to hopefully have these things that they can control. That isn't happening so far above their heads that they have to just watch it happen and decide whether to be in search or not. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So good on you, IETF. If you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show, we want to hear from you. One way to talk to us is the old social media. It's been out there since 2016 and earlier as well. We are at DTNS show on X, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky and Mastodon and Tumblr.

30:45For TikTok and YouTube, you can find us at Daily Tech News Show. We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Scott has some perspective on ads on your fridge. Yeah, yeah. We've been getting emails still about this. Keep them coming. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Scott writes, I heard you discussing the ads on Samsung appliances. Rob compared it to Minority Report. I recommend checking out the first episode of the Max Headroom TV show from 1987. I'm reminded that the episode blipverts every single day with all the advertising that we are subjected to. I love the Max Headroom and love the blipverts concept as well.

31:25See, all I know about Max Headroom, I mean, like I know it's a series, I know it's cool, is my dad's hockey towel was a Max Headroom collaboration with, I don't know which pop manufacturer that Max Headroom was tied to, but I'll try to post that excellent towel. Was Pepsi? I think it was Pepsi. I want to say it was Pepsi. Pepsi trying to be cool, but you know. Let me know if I'm wrong, because I'm not going to look this one up. I'm just going to wait for you to tell me at Feedback at Daily Tech News. And you can tell us again at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com because we love to know what you're thinking about.

32:01And we really love when you have insights on a story. Big thanks to Andy Beach and to Scott for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business. Just become a patron. Thanks to everybody who's been becoming new patrons. Always good to have all of you at patreon.com slash DTNS. We thank you. Be one of them.

32:23the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program