Intel Exec: ‘Panther Lake’ Commercial PC Push Will Help Us Regain Market Share

Another Intel executive says the company’s confidence in the Core Ultra Series 3 processors for the commercial PC market also stems from success it has seen with the integration of Intel’s vPro Fleet Services with Microsoft’s cloud-based Intune endpoint management solution.

Intel’s push to sell its new Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” chips for commercial PCs will help it regain share in the broader market segment, a company executive told CRN.

The remarks by Intel executive David Feng were made ahead of the company’s Wednesday launch of the Core Ultra Series 3 processors with Intel vPro, the umbrella of silicon-based management, security and optimization technologies it provides for commercial PCs.

Commercial PCs powered by the Core Ultra Series 3 with vPro are expected to become available from OEMs starting at the end of this month.

With Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan pushing the company’s latest comeback plan, the chipmaker continues to face competitive pressure from AMD. The rival grew its x86 market share in the PC segment by 4.6 points year over year to 29.2 percent against Intel’s 70.8 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, according to CPU-tracking firm Mercury Research.

The semiconductor giant is claiming that the Panther Lake chips can outperform AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series, in some cases by double or triple digits, while taking the crown for battery life in an x86-based laptop, reaching up to 27 hours for video streaming, 17 hours for office productivity and nine hours for a nine-pane Microsoft Teams video call.

Feng, a leader within Intel’s Client Computing Group, said the combination of Panther Lake’s 18A manufacturing process and architectural improvements led “one important partner” to say the lineup achieved the “impossible combination, which is high-performance CPU, GPU and AI—all with long, better battery life and power efficiency.”

“We’re pretty happy with the product. Our OEMs are very excited about the products they’re launching, so yes, we believe we’re well positioned,” said Feng, whose title is vice president and general manager of PC segments, in a Monday interview.

Intel Touts Big Momentum For vPro Platform

Another Intel executive, Jen Larson, said the company’s confidence in the Core Ultra Series 3 processors for the commercial PC market also stems from success it has seen with the integration of Intel’s vPro Fleet Services with Microsoft’s cloud-based Intune endpoint management solution over the past several months.

Since the integration was announced last September, Intel has seen over 1,400 global customers activate vPro Fleet Services, a hosted software-as-a-service solution the company introduced last year to simplify what was previously a “cumbersome” process for enabling fleet management with vPro-based PCs, according to the executive.

“If you think about the scale of fleets within those 1,400 customers, those aren’t 1,400 devices. Those are 1,400 customers with massive fleets in a lot of cases,” said Larson, who is general manager of commercial client segments within the Client Computing Group.

Intel Ups Ecosystem Push As New vPro Features Roll Out

With this new generation of Core Ultra processors, Intel is announcing new vPro capabilities, including a certification program for third-party applications and accessories that is meant to reduce CPU utilization, improve power efficiency and minimize the impact of background processes. Called vPro Certified, the program includes 17 vendors, including Dell Technologies, HP Inc., Logitech, Crowdstrike, Lenovo and Citrix.

Larson said the new certification program will coincide with joint go-to-market efforts between Intel and such vendors through the Intel Partner Alliance program.

“Channel partners can really take advantage of this combination of system devices software applications and accessory hardware [as a] complete package to offer to end customers to make it easier for them to adopt,” Feng added.

Other new vPro features includes Intel Device IQ, which analyzes PC telemetry data and then uses the processor’s GPU or NPU to remediate device issues; Intel Total Storage Encryption, which brings hardware-level protection to Microsoft’s BitLocker for the first time; and DTECT, which allows security ISVs to detect a wide range of cyber threats using an Intel-developed AI model that analyzes x86 machine code.

The last feature, which is an acronym for Deep Learning Trace-Based Execution Tracker Technology, is an extension of Intel’s Threat Detection Technology software development kit that allows ISVs to move security workloads to the GPU or NPU for acceleration.

For the first time, Intel is also promising to provide 10 years of security updates for Core Ultra Series 3 processors with vPro as part of its security assurance program, which includes its bug bounty programs, red teams for testing vulnerabilities and security development lifecycle approach. While Larson declined to say how many years of updates Intel previously offered, she said the new move is “definitely an extension.”

“Where that’s important are desktops that tend to have a longer lifecycle or potentially repurposed devices for some of our customers,” she said. “I don’t think all of our customers will leverage that, but it’s nice to have an added value for certain folks.”