High-Res Die Shots Unpack Intel Panther Lake's 18A Tiles In Stunning Detail

French-language hardware site Hardware & Co has some brilliant die shots of most of Intel's latest processors in a blog entry that was actually posted up back in July but only spotted recently in the broader international hardware community by well-known enthusiast InstLatX64. We're only going to take a look at one of the die shots here, but you should grab your favorite translator and head over to the site with the link at the bottom because there are lots of cool pictures.

Incredibly, Hardware & Co says it got these die shots at Computex 2026 solely using the author Nicolas' photography skills. Intel brought uncut wafers of all of its newest chips to the show, and these wafers have the silicon structures of the processors fully visible. Very carefully, it's possible to use a regular camera with a macro lens to take detailed die shots, and that's how these were apparently produced, rather than the complicated process required to strip the protective layers from a retail processor package.


These images are of the compute tile for Intel's mainstream Panther Lake processors, which is to say that it's the compute tile from all of the company's latest-generation Core Ultra processors for laptops, the Core Ultra Series 3 family. It's fabricated on the 18A process, which Nicolas states made getting these photos considerably more difficult due to its high density. Still, it's nevertheless quite possible to pick out the larger structures in the photos, and Hardware & Co has politely labeled them for us.

It's one thing to hear about the structure of a CPU, but it's quite another thing to see it laid out so clearly in physical silicon. You really can see the explicit structures: the massive Cougar Cove P-cores, the quad-core clusters of Darkmont E-cores, and the low-power cluster that's set apart from the other CPUs. You can also see that the compute tile integrates the media engines and the display engine despite that the actual Xe3 graphics hardware lives on a separate die altogether; this is once again for power management reasons. Decisions like this are why Panther Lake offers Arm-like battery life.

We don't want to steal all of Nicolas' hard work; if you're interested in seeing die shots of Wildcat Lake (labeled "Panther Lake core non-Ultra"), Clearwater Forest, Granite Rapids, and Sierra Forest, you can find those photos over at Hardware & Co's post. Thanks to InstLatX64 for pointing out these cool photos!