With its back against the wall, Intel is preparing to bring out its heavy artillery with the Nova Lake generation of microprocessors: what will it take to get back in the race with AMD?
It's no secret that Intel, despite its long history and decades of domination of the semiconductor market, is in dire straits. In the microprocessor sector alone, the Santa Clara-based company is facing ever stiffer, ever more relentless competition from a very fit AMD, which can count on its multiple Zen architectures to offer far more innovative solutions than Intel's Alder Lake, Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh. At the end of last year, however, we saw Intel try something new. No longer racing for watts consumed or gigahertz, the Arrow Lake generation was intended to be more efficient in every respect.
From a strictly technical point of view, it has been a success, but the transition is not yet sufficiently marked, and Intel is fully aware of this. In 2026, the American company is set to go much further with the simultaneous launch of its new engraving finesse - Intel 18A - and a new generation of microprocessors, Nova Lake. These are promising processors, but details were slow in coming, with Intel still very vague about its exact objectives. Thanks to several well-informed informants, however, we have some interesting leads: Nova Lake is already shaping up to be monstrous.
On X.com, chi11eddog details the first Nova Lake line-up, with details on the number of cores on board: a Core Ultra 9 with 16 high-performance cores (P) + 32 efficient cores (E) + 4 low-power cores (LP) for 150 W TDP, a Core Ultra 7 with 14P + 24E + 4LP for 150 W, a Core Ultra 5 with 8P + 16E + 4LP for 125 W, a Core Ultra 5 with 8P + 12E + 4LP for 125 W, a Core Ultra 5 with 6P + 8E + 4LP for 125 W, a Core Ultra 3 with 4P + 8E + 4LP for 65 W and, finally, a Core Ultra 3 with 4P + 4E + 4LP for 65 W.
Following on from this, another informant, Jaykihn, came up with his own data, again on X.com. First, it was indicated that the Nova Lake processors will provide an opportunity to "accelerate" RAM. Currently, Intel only supports DDR5-6400 with Arrow Lake: we'll be moving to DDR5-8000 on Nova Lake. For good measure, Intel will also be boosting the number of PCI Express Gen 5 lines directly managed by the processor: from 20 to 24 lines, broken down as follows: 1*x16 + 2*x4 or 2*x8 + 2*x4 or 4*x4 + 2*x4. These 24 lines will always be completed by the 8 PCIe 5.0 lines managed by the chipset, making a total of 32 PCIe 5.0 lines associated with 16 PCIe 4.0 lines. Nova Lake already looks heavily armed!
