Intel May Take A Page From AMD's Playbook With CPU Socket Longevity, Starting With Nova Lake

One of the greatest strengths of building an AMD-based machine in the last eight years has been AMD's fantastic support for Socket AM4. Socket AM5 looks much the same, with at least one more generation of CPUs coming to the DDR5-based platform. In that time, Intel launched no less than four separate desktop platforms, many of which never got a truly compelling performance upgrade option in their lifespan.

It looks like that may once again be the case for the beleaguered LGA 1851 platform upon which Arrow Lake sits. The first-generation desktop Core Ultra processors haven't exactly been a runaway success, in part due to early software and firmware issues, and in part due to underwhelming gaming performance that sometimes lagged behind chips from two generations back. The current rumor is that there will be an Arrow Lake refresh on the current LGA 1851 platform with minor upgrades, but that'll probably be it.

However, Intel's next platform will be the first to support its exciting-sounding Nova Lake processors. After that, the blue team will supposedly ship at least two and possibly three more processor families for the same socket, said to be known as LGA 1954. This information comes from contentious YouTube hardware leaker and analyst Tom of the channel Moore's Law is Dead.


Tom's information isn't always accurate, but he's often the first to leak some details, sometimes years in advance. According to him, the LGA 1954 platform will first play host to Intel's Nova Lake CPUs, followed by successive generations code-named Razer Lake, Titan Lake, and Hammer Lake. That would be four generations of CPU technology, equivalent to what we got out of Socket AM4 motherboards.

In the same video, MLID shares a lot of supposed information about Intel's next-next-generation CPUs, including that the vaunted bLLC feature is apparently not found in the processors' base tile but in fact on each of the compute tiles, meaning that Intel may actually ship a processor with a full 288 of L3 cache. He also explains that 3D stacked cache similar to 3D V-Cache is coming, but was apparently delayed to Titan Lake.

Other details revealed include that Intel is purportedly preparing an advanced version of its Application Performance Optimizer tool that will "force games to use specialized Intel optimizations" by "swapping out outdated instructions for newer ones in the .EXE of games." As noted, this raises all kinds of DRM and anti-tamper concerns, but it's a fascinating idea considering most game developers are afraid to even make use of AVX extensions that debuted back in 2011.

If you're interested to see his full reporting, you can check out the video on YouTube.