Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, in a departure from his usual sideline of posting excerpts from the Bible, is touting Panther Lake, the next-generation CPU based on Intel's upcoming 18A process node.

In his post to X, Gelsinger claims that Panther Lake is up and running and the OS is up and running. The Intel CEO also stated that full production is expected to begin next year.Not much is known about Panther Lake architecturally. However, the new 18A process node it uses brings two important innovations that Gelsinger mentioned.

"Intel 18A brings two key innovations that enable customers to achieve breakthrough scale and power efficiency: the RibbonFET gate all-around and PowerVia backside power technology.

Incidentally, the 18A node is the last of five new nodes in the so-called four years that Gelsinger and Intel have touted as part of their plan to regain technology leadership from rivals including Taiwanese chip manufacturing giant TSMC.

More specifically, the five nodes in four years opened with Intel 7. Intel 7 spawned Intel 4, which is undoubtedly the node formerly known as 7nm in the modest Intel 3 revision.

In any case, it is perhaps most notable that the new Panther Lake CPU family is built on Intel process nodes. Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake laptop chips are entirely outsourced to TSMC for the manufacture of the two active silicon tiles.

It is not yet entirely clear how Intel's next-generation desktop CPU, Arrow Lake (the predecessor to Panther Lake), will be constructed. However, most rumors suggest that at best a few of the Arrow Lake CPU models will contain no Intel active silicon at all (as opposed to the interposer tiles used to tie all the active tiles together), and all other chips and tiles likely to be made by TSMC.

In any case, it is unclear whether Panther Lake will be monolithic or another tile-based CPU, but Intel's news posting also claims that "Panther Lake's DDR memory performance is already running at the target frequency, and other signs of health It also claims that "there are However, being made with Intel silicon as opposed to TSMC seems to be a big part of its identity.

In any case, Panther Lake and 18A will be the biggest test yet for Intel's attempt to get back on track and put many of its current problems behind it. That is true not only for the Panther Lake CPUs themselves, but also for the 18A node.

Intel 18A is being promoted by Intel as a killer node for the company's new foundry service offering known as Intel Foundry, which will manufacture chips for customers including potentially existing rivals such as Nvidia and AMD It aims to compete with TSMC as a customer fab.

Simply put, a lot is riding on Panther Lake and 18A. Intel will no doubt be hoping that God Almighty is on its side when it comes time to launch.