After lots of searching and looking at i915 code. Someone on the Arch boards discovered that many early low power intel cpu’s have a power management bug that causes the kernel to core in the i915 driver.
The cure it to add i915.enable_dc=0 and make sure that you do not have the nomodeset on the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line on /etc/default/grub.
This fixed the 3 laptops that had the problem with kernel panics.
It does cause the battery life to be about 10% shorter due to gpu being at a higher power than needed.