Nova Lake delivers between 15% and 30% better performance than the Core Ultra 9 285K

The very first reports on the performance of Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake processors point to great things to come.

WhileIntel is already talking about Razor Lake and its ambition to achieve 700 TOPS of AI computing power, we prefer to focus on the present—or, at least, on our near future. So, before delving into the pros and cons of Razor Lake—a generation that isn’t expected to arrive until 2028 at the earliest— we’d like Intel to focus instead on Nova Lake, its next architecture, which is expected to launch early next year—likely in the first quarter of 2027. For now, Intel is keeping this architecture under wraps, but it’s quite possible that an announcement is in the works, possibly during CES 2027, which will take place January 6–9 in Las Vegas.

In the meantime, we can fortunately count on a few sources to learn a little more each day. That’s how we learned about the list of the first Nova Lake models that Intel plans to release, and in the process, we discovered that Nova Lake processors for desktop PCs and those for laptops will share the same naming convention —Core Ultra 4000—with only a suffix to distinguish the two lines. On the X platform, a user named Haze went a step further by simply sharing the first details regarding the performance of this Nova Lake generation. Of course, with several months to go before release, all of this still has plenty of time to change.

Single-thread performance of the first 28-core Nova Lake chip samples. © VideoCardz

Haze dug into the databases of PassMark, a tool regularly used by reviewers to evaluate PC performance. The first Nova Lake samples have been spotted, and in this case, the focus was primarily on the 28-core model. On CPUMark, this chip scores 5,210 points, while Core Ultra 9 285K processors average 5,059 points, as VideoCardz explains, AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D tops out at an average of 4,805 points, and the Core i9-14900KF manages only 4,635 points. We’ve also learned that the instructions per cycle (IPC) of a 28-core Nova Lake processor is reportedly 8% higher than that of the Core Ultra 9 285K and, even better, that Nova Lake processors equipped with the expanded bLLC cache could see this IPC increase by 17%. On top of that, we shouldn’t forget that other sources mention a power consumption of 285 W for the 28-core Nova Lake CPU, compared to 250 W for the Core Ultra 9 285K. It remains to be seen, then, whether energy efficiency is actually higher. Let’s just say that, at the very least, Nova Lake is intriguing.