Kernel Panic, especially at boot or sleeping mode: Thread "x" crashed. CPU issue?

Solution 1:

The screenshot with the panic shows that the reason for the kernel panic was that launchd stopped running.

I would suggest looking at the log files for launchd to see if you can find the reason for that in there. Usually you'll see something like "exited at instruction [...]" or "trying to read/write [...]" or "[...] (sent by PID [...])" right before the crash.

I don't see anything in your observations that indicate that this must be a problem with the CPU. It could be a software problem (such as problem with your installation media) - and it could be a hardware problem (most likely I would say is RAM - might also be a cooling problem).

I would suggest booting into Internet Recovery and let the machine sit there for an extended period of time to see if it crashes here. If it still crashes there, I would swap the RAM modules and check if that fixes the problem.