Recently, David A. Zisner, Chief Financial Officer at Intel, spoke at Deutsche Bank’s 2025 Technology Conference. Answering questions from the bank’s research division, Seeking Alpha has a transcript of the call. Within it, David does admit that they “fumbled the football on the desktop side”.

Particularly on the higher end of the range, Intel doesn’t quite compete with the best CPUs from AMD. Just looking at the top-selling processors on Amazon, you can see how AMD is filling up the list as its popular X3D processors dominate. On the other hand, the Core Ultra 200S series is still less popular than Intel’s previous generations.

David also comments, “We don’t perform as well, and it’s mostly because of this high-end desktop business that we didn’t have a good offering this year”. That is what we saw when the CPUs were released, as the review summary of 200S does show it’s not an excellent choice for building with, especially when AMD’s AM5 has plenty of great value alternatives.

Panther Lake is still on time

Intel comments on the fact that its 18A process had some yield issues at the beginning. With these chips not getting the amount they wanted, they are made and out in the market. It took some time to stabilize, but that shouldn’t impact 14A since that’s being built up from scratch and adding what they’ve learned from 18A to it.

All of that should mean that Panther Lake will be on time and released at the end of this year, with it ramping up with more products in the following year. In the conference, Intel also says how it needs external customers for its 14A process, otherwise it won’t get a return on it, and might be operating at a loss. So it’s better to put those government grants to good use and ensure they stay in production.

About the Author

Sebastian Kozlowski

With a fascination for technology and games, Seb is a tech writer with a focus on hardware, news, and deals. He is also a tester and reviewer for the site. Contact him @ [email protected]