The new Intel 18A CMOS process has succeeded to improve the energy efficiency over both all older Intel processes and the older TSMC 3 nm process used by Intel for its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs.

On the other hand, it seems that Intel struggles to reach high clock frequencies in this new manufacturing process because the Panther Lake CPU models have lower clock frequencies than the corresponding Arrow Lake CPU models made by TSMC and the few Panther Lake models with maximum clock frequencies of 5 GHz or more (Core Ultra X7 and X9) are very expensive, so it is likely that their availability will be limited (due to low fabrication yields).

Therefore it is plausible that for now companies like NVIDIA and Apple will choose to use Intel only for low-risk products, as the article says.