With Intel’s Arrow Lake refresh chips garnering much praise, attention now turns to what comes next—and that’s Nova Lake. In late 2026, we’re expecting the first look at Nova Lake desktop chips with up to 52 cores, and now perhaps even laptop chips with up to 28 cores, per TechSpot. This would represent a near-20% jump over existing 24-core laptop flagships and could deliver a significant performance boost.
Intel’s Nova Lake is the generation that’s supposed to turn the tables on AMD when it comes to raw power—especially in gaming. With twin new architectures, more cores, and even a big cache chip in the style of AMD’s 3D V-Cache, the hype is really starting to build. Now we’re hearing rumors about the potential performance capabilities of the top laptop chips. The new HX ones will have a lot of cores.
The latest rumors come from X user Jaykihn, who claimed that we’ll see an 8+16+4+2 configuration for the top Nova Lake chip’s cores. That’s eight performance cores, 16 efficiency cores, four low-power efficiency cores, and two Xe4 GPU cores. A weaker 4+8+4+2 chip will also be part of the HX range, representing a more affordable (yet less capable) option.
It’s clear from these configurations, though, that Nova Lake HX will be designed for use alongside discrete GPUs from AMD or Nvidia. Although the next-generation GPU cores will be very capable, two won’t cut it against the competition. Intel is expected to ship other Nova Lake chips with several more cores than that, so there may be better options for those wanting powerful integrated GPU performance on Nova Lake.
Elsewhere in Nova Lake, we expect to see enhanced PCIe 5 support with more lanes for greater dedicated GPU support. They will also enjoy much more powerful NPUs for local AI workloads and enhanced Thunderbolt 5 support up to 120Gbps.
The big desktop chip everyone is excited about could turn out to be a real monster, too. With up to 52 cores and as much as 288MB of L3 cache, it could be a gaming monster. How AMD responds with Zen 6 will be equally intriguing.
