Intel hasn’t competed for flagship gaming performance for a couple of generations now, but its next-generation Nova Lake chips could be the fastest ever when they drop later this year. Based on VideoCardz’s preliminary look at the product stack, it seems clear Intel is going after AMD’s gaming dominance in a big way with some seriously powerful processors.
The entire Nova Lake lineup is moving to a new socket, LGA 1954, with more pins than ever before. That’s in aid of increased memory and PCIe 5 support, but it’s just the start of what’s changing with these next-gen chips. There are new architectures everywhere, including the new Coyote Cove P-cores, Arctic Wolf E-cores, a next-generation Intel NPU 6 neural processor, and Xe3p graphics.
The top chip will have 52 cores in a dual-die configuration, with 16 P cores, 32 E cores, and 4 low-power cores, and a big-cache chip attached to deliver AMD X3D-style gaming performance. There will also be a 28-core variant, a single-die 28-core chip, and 16-core and 8-core options. Although all of them will sport Xe3p graphics, it’ll mostly be just two cores there. There’s also a rumored variant with 16 CPU cores and 12 Xe3p GPU cores, which could make it a very fast entry-level gaming CPU.
Credit: Intel
The flagship chips are likely to be the real killers, though. With 52 cores—and crucially, 16 performance cores for the first time—the top CPU is likely to compete with AMD’s best upcoming Zen 6 CPUs. If it can hold high clock speeds as well, the performance of such a consumer chip could be off the charts. The big cache will help close the gap AMD made with its 3D V-Cache in gaming, too, although Intel’s Arrow Lake refresh CPUs got perilously close to AMD’s best there.
There will also be Thunderbolt 5 and PCIe 5 support, offering faster connectivity for internal and external graphics, as well as faster storage options. VideoCardz claims the top chips will have a different naming scheme, potentially sitting above even core Ultra 9 branding.
Memory speed support will reportedly reach 8,000 MT/s, though it will likely be even faster with overclocking. AMD has been stuck on slower memory for a couple of generations now, so it will be interesting to see if it tries to catch up with Zen 6 later this year.
Given the entirety of this Intel roundup, I will be interested to see what AMD does to counter it. This fall is shaping up to be an exciting time for hardware enthusiasts.
