The Windows Recall feature takes screenshots of the screen content on Copilot PCs at regular intervals and saves them on the local PC. This enables users to search specifically for images, texts, and websites that they’ve loaded in the past. Although Microsoft has once again improved the security of the feature, there are still concerns about data protection. Partly because of Recall, but also because of the dangers of hidden screenshot programs in general, the developers of the Veracrypt encryption software have added a new protection function with the update to version 1.26.24. By default, this new feature prevents the software from taking any screenshots. Anyone or anything that tries to do so will only receive an image of the background. You can deactivate the protection against screen recordings in Veracrypt. However, the new setting will only take effect after restarting Windows. Roland Feist If you need a screenshot from Veracrypt, you must first switch off this protection. To do this, click on Performance and Driver Options in the “Settings” menu and tick the box next to “Disable protection against screenshots and screen recording”. Confirm the warning and the note to restart by clicking OK, close the window with OK, then reboot Windows and restart Veracrypt for the new settings to take effect. Further reading: Windows Recall is too risky for your PC. I can’t recommend it Read...

It was inevitable: Microsoft plans to carve out space on the Windows 11 taskbar for Copilot, while adding “Hey Copilot” as a wake word to trigger interactions with its AI. While the company isn’t making any overt changes to the branding of Windows 11, its executives this week spoke about reinventing the “AI PC,” the first generation of PCs it launched with early NPUs. Microsoft plans to make PCs smarter, including agents that can take actions and granting Copilot Vision more powers. Adding Copilot to the taskbar will actually be the most visible change to the Windows 11 user interface. However, it’s not the one Microsoft is focusing on. Now, it’s time to talk to your PC again. Yusuf Mehdi, the consumer chief marketing officer and executive vice president for Microsoft, said that the first priority of these new AI PCs was voice. “You should be able to interact with it naturally in text and primarily with voice,” he said in a briefing with reporters. “So you should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that, as easy as just talking to it.” “Voice will now become the third input mechanism to use in your PC,” Mehdi added. “It doesn’t replace the keyboard, but it will be an additive thing.” In the Windows 11 2023 Update, Cortana was a separate icon on the Windows 11 taskbar, next to the search box.Mark Hachman / IDG With Windows 10 transitioning into an unsupported state (well, kind of), Windows 11 is really the only focus for Microsoft right now. If the company is readying Windows 12, it will certainly be AI first. But for now, the company plans to test out these new features with Windows 11 Insiders in its beta program in the coming weeks. A key point: none of these new features require an NPU or a Copilot+ PC. They’ll be open to all supported Windows 11 PCs. Copilot: Front and center on the Windows taskbar Microsoft took pains to reiterate that these choices are optional. But if you so choose, you will be able to add Copilot to your taskbar. “Our vision is simple yet bold: to make the taskbar a dynamic hub that helps you accomplish more with less effort, transforming everyday interactions into moments of productivity and delight,” Microsoft said in a blog post. This is what the Windows 11 taskbar will look like now: Copilot essentially replaces the Search box. The Copilot box apparently will serve as a replacement for the existing Search box within Windows 11, though it will handle search queries as well. Importantly, the Copilot box will also include icons for Copilot Vision and Voice, tacitly encouraging you to let Copilot see your screen and hear you. It’s unclear if Copilot is the default. Microsoft says it relies on existing Windows APIs to return apps, files, and settings, without accessing your content. Still, its presence on the screen and taskbar serves as a reminder to use Copilot. Microsoft gives your hands a break with “Hey Copilot” It’s ironic that Microsoft is letting go of Windows 10 this week, since Cortana was one of its flagship features — and “Hey Cortana” was the way to wake it. Cortana, of course, suffered an ignominious deprecation at the hands of the company. In May, Microsoft signaled that “Hey Copilot” would be the trigger to wake Copilot in Windows 11. This feature — now called Voice Mode — is present in the Copilot options. According to Mehdi, it will reach general availability on millions of PCs this week. Saying “Goodbye” will close Copilot, the company said. There’s an ongoing tension with the way people were “trained” to type in search terms, Mehdi said, especially short searches that produced broad results. Now, prompts reward longer inputs, but people are reluctant to type those in because they don’t know what to write. Cortana did appear for a brief time in Windows 11.Mark Hachman / IDG “What we find with Copilot is people don’t know exactly what they want to say,” Mehdi said. “They don’t know exactly what they want to ask or how to ask it. And so with voice, it becomes much simpler, less precise than when you have to have it with a bunch of prompted text.” “I think that’s really kind of the key tipping point, is that you’re able to now easily talk to it and get what you want,” Mehdi said. Will office workers want to talk to their PCs? It’s optional The challenge is also cultural. Can you imagine yourself talking to a PC inside a shared office, even with cubicles, with dozens of coworkers listening in? According to Microsoft, you will: “Hundreds of millions of people today talk for billions of minutes in offices with headphones,” Mehdi said. “They found a way to make it work.” Mehdi also used a specific word to describe how users orally interact with their PCs: not talking “to” the computer, and not talking “with” it, either — but talking “through” it. “And I think that this change to talk with and talk to will come to reality, and we’ll see this thing really take off,” he said. If you’re dead set against talking to — er, through — your PC, there’s another option: Microsoft is adding the ability to interact with Copilot Vision via text. Even dictation on iPhones has helped Microsoft’s user base become more comfortable talking to/through their devices, Microsoft says.Apple Copilot Vision basically sees what you see on your PC’s screen. It doesn’t require an NPU, though my tests found that using it with a Copilot+ equipped PC certainly helped. (Some laptops I used wouldn’t work with Copilot PC, though that was early in the process.) In my test of Copilot Vision, I found it was lousy in helping with older games, but offered real potential in walking you through apps and procedures that you were unfamiliar with. It’s worth noting, though, that Microsoft is testing a Gaming Copilot specifically to help in certain tasks and is launching it with the ROG Xbox Ally. The problem? Copilot Vision was, at the time, all voice driven. Not everybody wants to broadcast to an office or other workspace that they don’t know how to interact with Photoshop. Now Microsoft is granting Copilot Vision an option for text interaction, just like Copilot. “So in the appropriate circumstances, if you want to type in, you can do that,” Mehdi said. It’s not quite clear whether people will want to talk to, with, or through their PCs. I’ve been in a lot of very quiet offices where no one says a word. But Microsoft seems set on making it as comfortable as it can to talk or chat with Copilot. The important thing for the company is that you’re using it. Read...

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Antivirus software is not free of errors and sometimes reports computer viruses where there are none. For this reason, the company Procolored, a manufacturer of textile printers, indignantly defended itself against the report of a printer tester that the software of one of its devices contained a virus. The testing official explained to Procolored that both Google Chrome and Microsoft Defender had triggered an alarm when the printer software was downloaded, and quarantined it. Despite Procolored’s protests, the tester persisted. He sent the software to the security company G Data, a manufacturer of antivirus programs. Upon investigation, it turned out that the printer software actually contained a backdoor virus called Xred and a Trojan. When G Data then confronted Procolored with the results, the company admitted that a virus had crept into its download area and provided a new version of its software. The online sandbox Any.run lets you start suspicious programs in a virtual Windows environment and study their behavior.Foundry How false alarms arise Procolored’s initially defensive attitude is understandable. After all, it does happen that antivirus tools sometimes recognize malware where there is none. But not often. Long-term tests have repeatedly shown that false alarms usually account for less than 1 percent of virus reports. However, they are always annoying, as many users are initially alarmed when their computer reports malware. How do these false positives come about? It has to do with the way antivirus programs work. On the one hand, they access daily updated virus definitions, which they can use to recognize intruders very reliably. However, as there are also many previously unknown malware threats on the internet for which no virus definitions exist, the manufacturers also incorporate heuristic and behavioral analysis methods into their software. Heuristic means that the programs look for suspicious characteristics of a file or program. Behavioral analysis, on the other hand, observes the programs running on the PC. Both methods work with probabilities and calculate whether a program with these or those characteristics could be a virus. False alarms occur from time to time. System programs particularly affected False alarms occur particularly frequently with programs that access system settings or data that the antivirus program classifies as confidential or even secret. This applies, for example, to several tools from the software company Nirsoft, such as the Produkey program. It reads the license keys for Windows and Office 2003/2007 and displays them in its window. A harmless process in itself, but it apparently provides the antivirus software with enough suspicious facts to classify the application as a virus. The same applies to numerous other programs that read out data such as license keys or passwords or change system settings. Among other things, the heuristics of the antivirus software look for combinations of certain system calls that are typical of malware. However, known hacker tools, such as those used to crack passwords, are also blocked by the virus guards. Even though they are offered for download legally. Hacking your own computer, for example to reconstruct a forgotten password, is not prohibited. A perfectly functioning antivirus program that produces no false alarms is an illusion. On the one hand, the software must not overlook malware under any circumstances, while on the other hand it should recognize harmless programs as such. It is therefore inevitable that the virus hunter will play it safe from case to case and report software as dangerous even if it is not. Check the trigger of a false alarm If your virus protection triggers an alarm, you must always scrutinize the trigger yourself. Otherwise, there is a risk that the antivirus program will block parts of the software that are absolutely necessary for it to function. A multi-stage procedure is recommended. Check the purpose of the tool: As a first step, you should consider what you have downloaded. If it is one of the tools already mentioned for determining license codes or passwords, you can assume that it is a false alarm. Check for reputation: However, you should also check where you obtained the software from and think about its reputation. To do this, you need to look at the file that caused the alarm and clarify its origin. If you are using Microsoft Defender as virus protection, you can find the file and its origin in the “Settings” under “Privacy and Security > Windows Security > Virus and Threat Protection > Protection History.” All malware found by Defender is listed there. Click on one of the entries to find out the file name and origin. There are similar directories in every other antivirus program. Defender lists the most recently found threats and shows you details if you wish. To do this, you need to point to an area with the mouse. A pop-down menu is then displayed.Microsoft It is important to know where you got the file from and whether this download site has a good or bad reputation. Sites that offer cracked programs and games or tools for hacking license queries etc., for example, have a poor reputation. Hackers often use this software to transfer malware to users’ computers. Websites that illegally make films and videos available for download also fall into this category. Check for signs of social engineering: Social engineering refers to tricks that cause a person to exhibit certain behaviors that they would not exhibit without these tricks. Social engineering is regularly used in the phishing of private data and, somewhat less frequently, in the distribution of malware. For example, emails or text messages claim that an order is in danger of getting stuck in the post if you don’t take action quickly and install a service tool. However, this is actually a virus. If the antivirus program now reports malware, there is a high probability that it really is malware. Typical social engineering techniques are pressure, urgency, emergencies, and requests for help. Watch out for scams: On the internet, the general rule is that if something seems too good to be true, then it usually is. This could be very favorable purchase offers, for example. If a virus message appears in such a context, then it’s probably justified. What to do in the event of a false alarm If your antivirus software declares a downloaded program to be malware, but you are sure that it is not, you can define the download file or the address of the source on the internet as an exception. Every protection program offers a corresponding function. Use alternative virus scanners If your antivirus program has reported malware and you are not sure whether it is actually malware or a false alarm, you can obtain a second opinion from another antivirus tool in a further step. It is not necessary to uninstall your existing software and then download and install a competitor’s product. It is quicker and easier to scan the suspicious file with an online scanner. Some antivirus manufacturers offer online scanners as a free service on their website. There is an area where you can upload suspicious files to the manufacturer’s servers and have them scanned there. Corresponding offers are available from Eset, F-Secure, and Trend Micro. You can use the online scanner from Trend Micro to scan your computer for existing malware. No installation is required.Foundry Or you can go straight to Virustotal, the online scanner from Google. It presents the suspicious file to several dozen antivirus programs from various manufacturers and displays their scan results. Although there have been isolated cases in the past in which Virustotal also failed to recognize malware, this is probably the safest way to rule out a false alarm. There are also alternatives to Virustotal, including Metadefender Cloud, Hybrid Analysis, and Jotti’s Malware Scan. Jotti’s Malware Scan is an alternative to Virustotal and sends uploaded files to a total of 13 different antivirus scanners. There is a data limit of 250MB per file.Foundry Offline scan with bootable USB sticks and DVDs If you frequently use different computers, you can also install a virus scanner on a bootable USB stick or DVD. In this way, you can check the respective PC first before you start your work. There are several ways to obtain such a stick or DVD. Some antivirus programs contain wizards that allow you to create a portable version on a stick or DVD directly from the software. This applies to the identical programs from Avast and AVG as well as the paid-for Norton Antivirus. The disadvantage: You must first install the respective antivirus program in order to create the disc. Other manufacturers offer rescue discs as ready-to-use downloads. These discs are usually based on a Linux live system that has been supplemented with a virus scanner. They are available from Avira and Kaspersky. After installing an additional component, the Avast virus scanner offers to create a rescue disc on DVD or USB stick with an integrated virus scanner. Foundry Third, you can also use Sardu. With this freeware you can create bootable USB sticks and DVDs and equip them with an antivirus tool of your choice. For this purpose, Sardu provides links to freely available rescue systems from antivirus manufacturers and offers to download the programs directly and integrate them into the stick or DVD. Start suspicious programs safely Another method of detecting false alarms is to run a suspicious program in a secure environment. This can be a virtual machine in which you install Windows and then start the software to be analyzed. If it brings a virus with it, it remains locked in the virtual machine. As a rule, it is not possible to skip to your desktop Windows. You can therefore take your time to observe whether it is ransomware, for example, which is now starting to encrypt the virtual SSD. The alternative is to use a sandbox. This is also a shielded environment that offers the malware no opportunity to break out. Online sandboxes such as Any.run are easy to use, but you can also use locally installable sandbox software such as Sandboxie. Caution: Many viruses are programmed in such a way that they only become active after a period of several hours, days, or even weeks. So if a program in a sandbox does not initially show any abnormalities, this does not mean that it is certainly safe. Virus warnings as a lure Especially in the dark corners of the internet, browser windows pop up again and again, reporting that a virus has allegedly been found on your PC. To solve the problem, you should immediately agree to download an antivirus program. Caution: These messages are invariably scams. The software offered normally has no function. However, it tries to persuade you to pay for a license by regularly displaying notices. Worse still, these programs often contain a virus themselves, making your PC part of a botnet, for example. Related content Best antivirus software: These 8 apps keep your PC safe Is Windows antivirus software still necessary in 2025? These 7 antivirus myths are dead wrong Read...

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Battlefield 6 has almost arrived and it’s already getting a lot of love from online shooter fans. The series has a reputation for smooth gameplay, so how is the latest entry faring? That’s the question Will Smith is answering in the latest PCWorld video, benchmarking its micro stutter (or possibly lack thereof?) on an ideal hardware setup. And as Will has explained before, this is a key metric in how smooth a game feels. Will’s test PC is running an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, so it’s just about the best hardware you can reasonably expect in the current PC gaming landscape. What we’re looking for isn’t necessarily high frame rates but smoothness. So what we don’t want to see is big spikes in the frame rendering time, which normally oscillate between 5 and 12 milliseconds. And most of the standard campaign gameplay doesn’t really have any of it, though some of the showpiece scripted sections (such as the beach landing) can hit it hard with effects like smoke. Some Battlefield veterans might be a lot more concerned with multiplayer performance, where Will turned off a lot of the bells and whistles like super-high resolution, DLSS, ray tracing, etc. There are more variables in the frame time due to the general chaos of multiplayer and a lot of extra processing that goes on in a multiplayer game. But even in multiplayer, the render time was only a little more chaotic, with possible spikes coming from loading shaders. Even with tons of player characters on the screen, Battlefield 6 seems to be remarkably stable. It looks like the developers have also turned off some of the more performance-hitting effects in the multiplayer mode. For more on the latest PC gaming hardware and performance, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube and join us every week for The Full Nerd podcast. Read...

Microsoft’s release of its Limited Edition Crocs has moved out of beta and into general release, the company said Friday. The $79.95 Crocs are now available in several sizes. Originally, Microsoft had made the Limited Edition Crocs available in October, timed with the company’s 50th anniversary celebration. The “shoes” were originally made available as part of a Microsoft-sponsored sweepstakes. However, the footwear has now become a viral hit of sorts. “Based on the incredible response and positive engagement across social media, we’re thrilled to share that the Microsoft Limited Edition Crocs Bundle officially drops globally beginning today,” the company said in an updated blog post. The Crocs ship in a Windows XP-inspired theme. It’s based upon the “Bliss” background, inspired by a photograph from Charles O’Rear taken just a few miles from my home. (Like Windows, the Sonoma, Calif. vista looks nothing like the original photograph.) They also include custom Jibbitz charms taken from Microsoft iconography, such as the mouse cursor. There’s even a Bliss-themed drawstring backpack, perfect for carrying them to your next gala or shindig. Where can you buy such wonders? At Microsoft’s official merch site, where sizes are available from a women’s 4/men’s 2 all the way up to a women’s 19/men’s 17. While I have actually purchased several Microsoft’s Windows ugly sweaters with my own hard-earned cash, for me the Crocs are a step too far — I’m well into the “New Balance” era of my life. But if you’re a hip influencer, perhaps you can grab one before they’re gone. Read...

Intel’s next-generation mobile processor, “Panther Lake,” builds incrementally on the excellent “Lunar Lake” chip populating laptops right now. But there’s something odd afoot: a “16-core, 12 Xe graphics cores” version that could be Intel’s answer to AMD’s Ryzen AI Max, complete with multi-frame graphics generation powered by AI. Intel has officially revealed its new Panther Lake architecture, and it gives enthusiasts a lot to chew on: a return to the performance (P-cores), efficiency (E-cores), and low-power efficiency (LP E-cores) cores of Intel’s first Core Ultra chip, Meteor Lake. Intel has returned with a fifth-generation NPU capable of 50 TOPS and an image processing unit (IPU) that actually uses AI for some functions. Intel’s “Xe3” GPU is worth some discussion all by itself, with its awkward branding and powerful multi-frame generation that will potentially elevate frame rates three or four times what they were before. Can Panther Lake address mainstream laptops, handheld PCs, and this new breed of “AI workstations” AMD’s Strix Halo is aiming for? Well, with three separate processors, maybe. Intel’s confidence in its 18A manufacturing process may be a bit overblown, however, as several portions of Panther Lake are still being manufactured overseas, including the 12Xe version of the new, disaggregated (separate) GPU tile. In terms of performance, we know some further details. Intel says that Panther Lake’s single-threaded performance should be 10 percent higher than Lunar Lake at the same power. Compared to both Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, Intel’s Panther Lake offers more than 50 percent better multithreaded performance, Intel says. Intel is also claiming that the total Panther Lake system-on-chip will consume 10 percent less power than Lunar Lake, and demonstrated a trio of laptops running a Core Ultra chip from each generation to back that up. Some of this will be due to the design of the chips; some will come from the process technology, including the 18A manufacturing process that’s become a critical part of Intel’s future. A summary slide of the features Intel is offering inside Panther Lake.Intel Intel launched Lunar Lake at Computex 2024, and we had Lunar Lake benchmarking completed by late September. (Intel’s been talking up Panther Lake for over a year, too.) Intel representatives were quite clear that CES 2026 in January will be the launch event for Panther Lake laptops, and they will come to market soon after. I suspect that Panther Lake will be marketed as the Core Ultra Series 3, but that’s just an educated guess. “Panther Lake literally combines the power efficiency of Lunar Lake and the performance of Arrow Lake in a product family, and we’re using Intel 18A to bring these architectures together,” Jim Johnson, the senior vice president in charge of Intel’s Client Computing Group, said at Intel’s launch event in Phoenix. Intel is also quite proud of its 18A process, the foundation of Panther Lake, which Intel fellow Tom Petersen called the most expensive die Intel has ever made. “We can confidently say Intel Foundry is in production on the only two nanometer class process that was developed and will be manufactured here in the United States,” Kevin O’Buckley, the senior vice president and general manager of Intel Foundry Services. Intel’s Panther Lake will be available in multiple configurations. Is this the Core Ultra X?Mark Hachman / Foundry Intel’s Panther Lake: what are the features of its three chips? Intel typically describes the architecture of its upcoming processors during its “Tech Tour” conferences like the one it held to describe Panther Lake near Phoenix, then provides the speeds, features, and prices of the actual processors you’ll be able to buy at launch. This was a combination of the two: some details we know, and some we don’t. Contrast that to Qualcomm’s launch event of the rival Snapdragon X2 Elite: we know how fast each chip is and how many cores are inside them, but not the deep details of their architecture. Right now, Intel’s “Panther Lake” consists of three chips, primarily consisting of the new “Cougar Cove” P-core and the “Darkmont” E-core and LP E-cores: An 8-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 4 low-power (LP) E-cores; 4 Xe3 GPU cores and 4 ray-tracing units; and memory interfaces to either 6800 MT/s LPDDR5x or 6400 MT/s DDR5. A 16-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 4 LP E-cores; 4 Xe3 GPU cores and 4 ray-tracing units; and memory interfaces to either 8533 MTs/ LPDDR5x or 7200 MT/s DDR5. A 16-core chip, with 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, and 4 LP E-cores, 12 Xe3 GPU cores and 12 ray-tracing units; and memory interfaces to 9600MT/s LPDDR5x, period. Intel We don’t know how much power Panther Lake will consume; one executive on Intel’s marketing team said that Panther Lake is “expanding on the segment that we addressed with Lunar Lake,” and that the chip power or TDP will go “up and down” from there. That will obviously affect which products Intel’s Panther Lake chip will fit into. Gameplay demos of an updated Painkiller game running on the chip used both a 45-watt reference platform as well as a 30-watt laptop, and Intel’s Petersen referred to a “max” of 44 watts. In total, Panther Lake can address up to 96 GB of LPDDR5x memory or 128GB of DDR5 memory. Intel’s Panther Lake is divided into tiles, or what rival AMD calls “chiplets”: a disaggregated design that allows tiles to be placed and swapped in and out. (Intel even provided a knockoff Lego kit of Panther Lake as a tchotchke.) In Panther Lake, there is a compute tile, a GPU tile, a platform controller tile, and a “base tile” that the other tiles are mounted upon. All of the tiles are connected together via a second-gen scalable I/O fabric. The base tile connects to the active tiles via Foveros 2.5D packaging technology, allowing Intel to stack die one on top of the other. Intel According to Johnson, the disaggregated tiles means more PC segments and more price points. “Panther Lake will be the most broadly adopted, globally available AI PC platform Intel has ever delivered,” he said. Right now, none of these Panther Lake chips have product names, and Intel isn’t telling us how fast they’ll run either in sustained or in turbo mode. But they will not have hyperthreading; from Meteor Lake on, Intel rearchitected its performance cores to deliver high enough single-thread performance without the need to add an additional thread. Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan has called this decision a mistake, but Intel’s plan to eliminate hyperthreading was already baked into the design. The GPU tile is kept separate. Separating the GPU tile theoretically means that Intel could just “drop in” a replacement, though it’s a bit more complicated than that. Still, it’s natural to see this and the eventual RTX chiplets being talked about as part of Intel’s Nvidia investment as two points on the same line — though Intel carefully declined to confirm this. Here’s a detail you may find intriguing: the 16-core, 12 Xe3 chip isn’t designed to connect to a discrete GPU, and that chip only contains a total of 12 PCI Express lanes as a consequence. The 16-core, 4 Xe3 version includes 20 PCIe lanes, which certainly implies that this version may appear in gaming laptops. Intel executives said that there’s nothing there preventing 16-core, 4Xe3 chip from connecting to a discrete GPU, so that seems likely. “The 8-core will service the thin-and-light [market], the second [16-core version] with the small GPU is going to be attached to a discrete GPU, and the big one will have a life of its own, said Fuad Abazovic, principal at ACAnalysis. “It’s whatever you like with Lunar Lake, but with double the cores and much wider, much bigger GPU, but you still keep the battery life.” You can barely make out the tiles on this 8-core implementation of the Intel Panther Lake chip.Mark Hachman / Foundry The 8-core Panther Lake chip will have 12 PCIe lanes (8 PCIe 4, 4 PCIe 5), while the 16-core chip will have 20 PCIe lanes (8 PCIe 4, and 12 PCIe 5). The 16-core, 12Xe Panther Lake option drops back down to the 12 PCIe lanes and configuration of the 8-core chip. Also of interest: integrated Thunderbolt 4, but not Thunderbolt 5. That means another year’s worth of Thunderbolt 4 docks, with discrete Thunderbolt 5 controllers probably only attached to pricey gaming PCs. Enthusiasts shouldn’t really care which process technology Intel will use to make its chips, though Intel has been nearly desperate to win customers for Panther Lake’s 18A manufacturing process and the subsequent 14A process which will follow it. It had to be embarrassing for Intel to make Lunar Lake’s key tiles at rival TSMC. Now, Intel has started to bring its manufacturing in house once again. All of the compute tiles are manufactured on Intel’s 18A process, but all of the platform controller tiles are made at TSMC, as well the 12 Xe3-core GPU tile. The other 4 Xe3 GPU tiles will be manufactured on Intel’s Intel 3 process. Panther Lake CPUs: Cougar Cove, Darkmont, and better user adjustments Inside the CPU tile are the P- and E-cores, the NPU 5, plus what’s known as the Image Processing Unit 7.5 as well as the memory interface. Panther Lake is a system on a chip, so referring to it as a “CPU” isn’t exactly correct. But onboard Panther Lake are two separate CPU architectures: the “Cougar Cove” performance cores, and the “Darkmont” efficiency cores. Stephen Robinson, its chief CPU architect and an Intel fellow, traced the roadmap: Lunar Lake had two types of cores, but it couldn’t scale to a high frequency. Arrow Lake’s Skymont efficiency cores improved performance, but didn’t offer all-day battery. Lunar Lake offered dedicated power delivery for the E cores, and added additional cache memory, for a total of up to 18MB shared level-3 cache. A comparison between Intel’s 16-core and 16-core, 12Xe versions of its Panther Lake processor. Essentially, Panther Lake takes the low-power islands of Lunar Lake, combines them with the additional cores previous generations offered, and upgrades the performance cores for improved single-thread performance. (The latter aspect is usually what gets attributed to how quick and responsive an OS is, at least in the MacOS world.) Intel’s new 18A process also offers what’s called “backside power delivery,” or PowerVia, which routes power away from the signal logic. That improves frequency while reducing idle power loss — both exactly what Intel wanted to achieve. According to Robinson, Cougar Cove is “optimized” for 18A, with better branch prediction and memory disambiguation. In Darkmont, Intel achieved better prefetching. It also implemented what it calls “nanocode,” where Intel has taken some microcode and added the ability to decode in each of its parallel front-end clusters, Robinson said. It all works out to 40 percent lower power for the entire Panther Lake chip at the same performance of Arrow Lake, or 10 percent more performance at the same power, Intel executives said. Intel demonstrated three laptops running its three Core Ultra processors. Here, Intel is measuring the total power consumed by each laptop.Mark Hachman / Foundry Intel also exposes how tasks will be routed through each type of core through a technology called Thread Director. In Panther Lake, Thread Director should feel familiar: a workload will first land on the low-power E-cores, then move to the full-power E-cores if it proves too much for the low-power cores. From there, it will be pushed to the performance cores, Rajshree Chabukswar, the Intel fellow in charge of the technology, said. Intel’s technology is also smart enough to auto-assign some threads based on the application, so Microsoft Teams will always begin on the LP E-cores and likely remain there. A benchmark like Cinebench, which asks for all cores and threads, will get them across all three different types of cores. In games, however, Panther Lake can do something interesting: assign the game to E-Cores, then to P-cores…but then use some of the leftover power and give it to the GPU. “Using OS containment zones and some of our graphics driver hints and our power management, we are able to deliver 10 percent [more] frame rate because we are making power headroom available to graphics,” Chabukswar said. As the HWinfo utuility software shows, a task on Panther Lake is first routed to the low-power Darkmost cores.Mark Hachman / Foundry Normally, users can adjust the Windows 11 performance by adjusting the Windows power slider. With Panther Lake, Intel is going a bit further with what it’s calling the Intelligent Experience Optimizer. Intel already has the Dynamic Tuning Utility, which uses AI to dynamically optimize the system for performance, battery life, or thermals — like the “AI Mode” in an MSI laptop’s system settings. Most gaming laptops already have “turbo” or “silent” modes, but the impression that Intel gives is that users will have more input into how the laptop performs. “It’s purely load-driven. When I see that I need more performance, it will move there,” Chabukswar said. “When I see that I need more efficiency, it will move there automatically.” In two examples, UL Procyon’s Office Productivity benchmark and the single-threaded Cinebench 2024 benchmark, turning on Intelligent Experience Optimizer boosted performance by 19 percent on both tests. Panther Lake GPU: 50 percent better performance than Lunar Lake Intel’s integrated graphics path continues: Meteor Lake included Xe, Lunar Lake added a Xe2 GPU, and Panther Lake moves to Xe3. The killer selling point? Multi-frame generation, which injects AI-generated frames between actual rendered frames. However, there’s an issue with branding. Intel’s “Battlemage” discrete GPU was considered part of the Xe2 generation, while Intel’s Panther Lake contained “Xe3” cores. Yet both Battlemage and Panther Lake are also both part of the Intel Arc B-series of products, which doesn’t make much sense. Intel did show a roadmap that signals a “Xe3P” variant is coming, however. Intel’s GPU branding is still a little odd. Panther Lake, from what Intel showed, will have both 4Xe and 12Xe variants. Not everything scales linearly; while the 32 XMX engines on the 4Xe variant triples to 96 in the 12 Xe version, the amount of level-2 cache quadruples from 4MB to 16MB. Who is the 12Xe version of Panther Lake aimed at? “The cheesy answer is ‘everybody,” said Daniel Rogers, vice president and general manager of PC products at Intel, in an interview. “I think you’ll see it show up in a few ways, One, maybe the most obvious is for gamers. In some gaming designs and some handhelds as well — that’s a good fit.” Rogers said the 12-Xe Panther Lake will also be the “flagship solution for commercial notebooks on the AI side,” Rogers said. Is it Intel’s answer to AMD’s Strix Halo? “Everybody’s chasing high-performance local AI, and we will certainly do the same,” Rogers said. The Xe3 engine also improves the ray tracing, eliminating backups in the pipeline through a new thread sorting unit. It also doubles the anisotropic filtering on die, Petersen said. We’re not seeing actual game benchmarks quite yet, but this is how Intel’s Xe2 compares to Xe3, inside its own internal tests. The Xe3 GPU was re-designed for scalability, Petersen said. In the GPU’s render slice, Intel increased the number of Xe cores from four to six, increased the level 1 cache from 192 kilobytes to 256KB, and upgraded the level-2 cache from 8 megabytes to 16MB, reducing the need to access the local memory and increasing performance. Intel also moved to a variable allocation strategy when assigning threads, with “dramatic” effects on performance, Petersen said. While Intel declined to show actual benchmarks, Petersen did show how traffic to the SOC’s memory fabric dropped by 17 percent to 36 percent on key games. He also demonstrated some “micro benchmarks,” or internal tests that Intel itself uses to determine generation-over-generation performance in specific tasks. The X3 architecture also improves the way in which a frame is rendered, including DirectX calls and pre-rendering, but Petersen said real gains were granted by the larger level-1 cache. All told, Intel was able to cut the time to execute one frame to about 22.84ms on the 12Xe chip, versus 45.44ms for Lunar Lake. Essentially, Intel can generate about 50 percent higher GPU performance than Lunar Lake, or about 40 percent more performance per watt than Lunar Lake, Petersen said. Intel’s Reference Validation Platform motherboard for Panther Lake.Mark Hachman / Foundry Multiframe AI rendering hits Panther Lake’s integrated graphics The Xe3 GPU also supports cooperative vectors, which Intel showed off with Microsoft this June. Cooperative vectors use AI as a way to replace the overwhelming requirement for shaders. Microsoft has also proposed storing them in tbe cloud. Cooperative vectors, in Petersen’s words, essentially “replace that render pipeline, that raster process, with a 3D model.” “So effectively, we can completely eliminate the render pipeline and replace it with a per pixel AI,” Petersen added. “You can see this might be kind of a look forward into a future where graphics is really substantially different, and it is primarily AI,” Petersen added. That future is already here…sort of. XeSS 2, launched alongside Intel’s “Battlemage” GPUs, launched XeSS Super Resolution, XeSS Frame Generation, and Xe Low Latency, all designed to speed up the graphics powering video games. XeSS Frame Generation injected an AI-generated frame between two “real,” rendered frames, and used the low-latency technology to offset the delay that engendered. “Hybrid rendering is kind of where we are for most titles today,” Petersen said. “Things have indeed moved forward, and we are now into the world of hybrid rendering, plus AI. And in this world, not all pixels are rastered. In fact, most pixels are not rastered. They are generated.” Now, Intel has launched XeSS-MFG, or XeSS Multiframe Generation, which can inject as many as three additional interpolated frames, in conjunction with the existing upscaling and multiframe generation technologies. You’ll be able to control it as paert of Intel’s existing Intel Graphics Software package, where you’ll have the option of setting the additional frames, or letting the application itself make that decision, Petersen said. That software will also offer options such as specifying how much system memory is shared with the GPU, a feature Intel announced earlier and that AMD has exploited for better AI. Intel’s Intel Graphics Software will allow user control over the new multiframe generation feature. The idea is simple: more frames means a smoother gaming experience, and happier gamers with PCs which can exceed playable frame rates. Even games designed to benefit from XeSS 2 will support XeSS 3, Petersen said. Yes, those frames will introduce lag. Each generated frame will add about 1.5 milliseconds of latency per frame, with about 1 ms of setup, Petersen said, or about 6 ms per three generated frames. That’s bad when the frame rate is always high, he said, but when frame rates are at 25 to 30 fps, the latency isn’t as bad versus the value of the added frames. According to Petersen, the latency or lag that bothers gamers isn’t really the “click to photon” latency where there’s a delay in the player’s action. The more noticeable lag is what he called “motion to photon,” where the latency between a user’s input and perceived motion creates nausea in VR and wobble when mousing. Eventually, that could be solved by AI prediction of mouse movements or a variable rate of rasterized to AI- rendered frames. “There’s a whole bunch of technologies that have not been announced, that are not done, that could make that [latency] better, but right now you can see some,” Petersen added. “And if you’re more latency sensitive, depending on the game type, I would say, turn off frames and just run regular frames.” In addition to working toward cooperative vectors, Intel is also launching precompiled shader distribution, where your PC doesn’t have to wait to compile shaders, it just downloads precompiled shaders from the cloud. It is also developing Intelligent Bias Control version 3, first launched this summer, in which the CPU and GPU talk to one another and route power to the appropriate logic. It’s the complement to Thread Director, where GPU performance could be increased by 10 percent by that technology alone. Finally, Intel’s PresentMon software will differentiate between rasterized and rendered/generated frames, and provide an indication whether a given frame was real. It will also demonstrate animation stutter, if frames are out of sync. Intel’s PresentMon will now offer more granularity into what you’re seeing. According to James Sanders, a senior analyst at TechInsights, said that there’s potential for creating a market for thin-and-light gaming laptops with the 16-core, 12Xe3 Panther Lake part. “Games that are like Marvel Rivals I would imagine would be a really good fit for that type of hardware,” Sanders said. “If you’re doing esports, that’s something that would be a good fit. But if you’re playing Final Fantasy, where you’re worried more about the graphics performance, you’ll want to go to a discrete GPU. But it is clear that that communicating what that market is going to be something that Intel and their OEMs need to work on, and that’s going to take time.” Panther Lake’s NPU: more effective, but not much changes The story of Panther Lake’s NPU: it’s about the same as Lunar Lake, just more efficient. Lunar Lake’s NPU 4 supported 48 TOPS. The NPU 5 inside Panther Lake supports 50 TOPS in a much smaller package. An NPU basically performs a ton of multiply-accumulate operations, performed by what’s known as a MAC array. Lunar Lake and Panther Lake both have the same number of MACs — 12,000 — but Lunar Lake spread those out into six neural compute engines, while Panther Lake has only three. Panther Lake’s NPU 5 also has 4.5MB of scratchpad RAM, 256KB of level-2 cache, and 6 SHAVE DSPs. Panther Lake’s NPU can perform 4,096 MACs/cycle at int8 (8-bit integer), 4.096 MACs/cycle at FP8 (8-bit floating-point), and 2,048 MACs/cycle at FP16. Those numbers become more significant and more familiar when you’re performing generative AI functions, where you’re specifying the complexity of a particular task. One future Intel envisions involves “agentic” browsers performing those agentic functions locally, on the NPU instrad of the cloud.Mark Hachman / Foundry “What we really wanted was more MACs and less of the other stuff,” Petersen said. Some of the improvements are just Intel trying to be smarter about how it handles data. Running Stable Diffusion’s AI art generator, the algorithm doesn’t really need the more complex FP16 granularity. Instead, FP8 can be used; in Petersen’s example, energy usage dropped 35 percent from 108 joules to 70 joules. Panther Lake also includes what’s known as the Image Processing Unit 7.5, responsible for taking the image your PC’s webcam sees and making it look its best. One of the AI features Intel itself uses: local tone mapping, designed to improve the image quality by using AI.Mark Hachman / Foundry “That means handling the full spectrum of lighting from bright outdoor sunlight streaming in through a window to dim corners of a warehouse at night,” said Tomer Rider, the IPU product marketing manager. “It means capturing and preserving fine details and high resolutions without introducing the noise, so what you see is crisp and accurate. It also means creating a life like natural image, vivid colors, true to life, skin tones and high frame rate that makes everything feel real wherever you are and whatever the line is, the IPU makes sure that the image looks its best.” For Panther Lake, the IPU does three things: it adds enhanced HDR for wider dynamic range, and includes AI-based noise reduction and AI-based tone mapping. The “staggered HDR” takes both a short exposure and a long exposure and merges them together. All of these work with both integrated laptop webcams as well as standalone devices. Up to 5 Mpixel sensors are supported, which translates to 2560 x 1920 pixels in the real world, all whie shaving off 1.5 watts or so of power. Intel showed off a trio of laptops of varying camera quality (the middle being best) to highlight its Panther Lake Image Processintg Unit.Mark Hachman / Foundry AI noise reduction actually uses AI to filter out noise, especially in low-light environments, Rider said. And tone mapping divides up an image or video into different regions, then uses AI to improve the visuals. In this case, the IPU may be actually asking the NPU to perform these functions. “Either the NPU or the GPU” will handle the AI, Rider said. “We’re working with all the NPU and GPU teams in order to make sure that the system makes the right choice when selecting whether it’s the GPU or the NPU.” Panther Lake’s wireless features are surprisingly cool Finally, Panther Lake also includes a wireless module, which places the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi MAC onto the chip and separates the remainder into a separate die inside the package, known as Whale Peak 2. Panther Lake supports both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth Core 6.0, but with some neat twists. The most interesting wireless features Panther Lake adds are part of Bluetooth. Panther Lake now supports Auracast, a wireless technology launched in 2024 that supports simultaneous playback across multiple devices, so that you don’t have to share an earbud with a friend. Intel’s chip also supports platform sounding, which uses distance- and phase-change modeling to track the distance between two devices, to better locate them quickly. Bluetooth also uses both wireless antennas, and not just one, which should lengthen Bluetooth connectivity. Intel fellow and wireless CTO Carlos Cordeiro used 52 meters as an example distance. One of the best arguments for the use of Wi-Fi 7: the improved performance in terms of specific CableLabs tests. Panther Lake actually supports what’s known as Wi-Fi 7 Release 2, which haven’t been officially certified. Basically, the R2 features facilitate better communication between the access point and your PC, resulting in fewer dropped connections and improved communication speed and latency, Multilink reconfiguration allows the router to shift your PC from one channel to the other, while restricted TWT allows the two to figure out which applications (and devices) deserve the most priority. Single-link eMLSR allows one of the two antennas on your laptop to “sniff” out a different channel, and quickly shift if it opens up. It also allows the laptop to signal of it’s using a channel for peer-to-peer communication. You probably don’t use Intel’s Connectivity Performance Suite, a small Windows app which allows you to see the various access points available to your PC and allows it to prioritize voice and video calls or streaming apps. Intel is adding AI to this list of options, so if yor PC is having a prolonged session with a cloud service like ChatGPT, you can ensure that that traffic is given priority. What’s next for Panther Lake? Intel’s deep dive in the desert certainly opened the doors to reveal a number of features about Intel’s next-gen mobile chip. What we still don’t know is how many versions of the chip itself will eventually ship, and what they’ll be called. Reports from Asia now indicate that the 12Xe version will be branded as the Core Ultra X, to differentiate them from the “vanilla” version of the Core Ultra chip itself. Naturally, we’ll have to wait even longer for the first performance testing of the chip itself, as well as the subsequent announcements of laptops using the chip. Those should happen at or near the time of the CES 2026 show in January, we’re told. It’s there we should expect customer announcements, as well. It was a little surprising not to see any future Intel CPU roadmaps, at all, after Panther Lake has been talked about for over a year. “Nova Lake” should be the next step. “Meteor Lake served its purpose,” said Mario Morales, the group vice president and general manager of semiconductors at IDC. “You needed to have a dog in the race. That can be easily relegated into the lower end. Lunar Lake came in and hit the sweet spot, and it did emphasize a lot more performance efficiency, which I think was another important message for them as they introduced new P-cores and E-cores into the…PC space. Panther Lake is important for them, as it’s the next step. Nova Lake is what gets them to par — with AMD for sure, but also maybe with Apple.” Still, we now know details of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Elite as well as Intel’s Panther Lake. Waiting in the wings: AMD. Is Gorgon Point the next name you’ll need to know about in laptop processors for 2026? Disclosure: Intel held its press briefings in Phoenix, and would not pre-brief reporters in other locations or over video meetings. The company paid for my room, boarding, and travel expenses, but did not ask for or exert any editorial control over this story or other PCWorld content. Read...

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