Intel’s next-gen desktop CPU Nova Lake allegedly spotted and can’t come soon enough

We’re still getting our heads around Intel’s latest Arrow Lake desktop CPUs (actually you could say, so is Intel). But here comes news of its successor, namely Nova Lake.

It’s been spotted on a shipping manifest by X user X86 is dead&back (via Tom’s Hardware). The manifest provides little detail, though it seems to indicate the chip in question may be a low-end i3 variant. Of course, Intel no longer uses the “i” prefix in its CPU nomenclature, so that may be some kind coincidence or just a hangover from the previous branding era, a placeholder or similar.

Anyway, Intel itself hasn’t revealed much about Nova Lake other than to say that it will mostly be built in house, with a few isolated models possibly farmed out to TSMC.

Due around the 2026 or 2027 time frame, Intel hasn’t explicitly said which production node will be used by Nova Lake, but given that it says its next mobile CPU, Panther Lake, will be produced internally on 18A silicon, and that Panther Lake comes before Nova Lake, 18A at least seems like a safe bet.

While there are some rumours that Nova Lake will be built on Intel’s future 14A node, that is rather speculative, what with Intel yet to prove that 18A is working well. Moreover, actual test chips like this built on 14A doesn’t seem likely.

The other big question involves Nova Lake’s construction. It’ll be a chiplet design again, but what kind of chiplets? Arrow Lake’s architecture arguably suffers due to the memory controller being located on a separate die from the CPU cores, introducing performance-sapping latency.

Intel’s more successful Lunar Lake laptop chip used just two chiplets and put the CPU cores on the same die as the memory controller. It’s unclear exactly how Panther Lake and Nova Lake will be segmented. But some rumours claim Panther Lake will have CPU cores and memory controller on the same die, while Nova Lake will not.

As for the specifics of those cores, it’s thought Nova Lake will get Panther Lake’s Panther Cove P-cores, renamed to Coyote Cove, plus Arctic Wolf E-cores. At this stage, very little is known about how those cores perform. But, arguably, it’ll be that 18A silicon that defines Nova Lake as much as anything.

How good will 18A be? Will Intel actually use 18A for Nova Lake? After all, Arrow Lake was originally meant to at least in part built on Intel’s 20A node before Intel summarily ditched that idea and shifted the whole thing bar the base tile to TSMC, with the CPU cores made on TSMC’s N3B node.

Anyway, with Arrow Lake hardly setting the PC enthusiast world alight, we dare say Nova Lake can’t come soon enough. Lunar Lake shows that Intel hasn’t totally lost its mojo, so there’s no reason why Nova Lake can’t be a banger. But it does rather need to be just that to get Intel back on track and stop what currently feels like a bit of an inevitable slide towards an eventual demise.