Intel Nova Lake CPUs To Hit Desktops First With AVX-512 For Heavy-Duty Compute
It's not really a secret what he's talking about; Intel's upcoming Nova Lake CPUs will feature new architectures for every single part of the chip. Those architectures will all be debuting in Nova Lake, meaning that the company's enterprise products based on the same technology are coming later. Of course, Intel has almost always done this, historically, and in fact, so has AMD, which is exactly what made the recent launch of Zen 6 in the EPYC 'Venice' CPUs so odd.
Hallock had a lot to say about the future of Intel's offerings for the enthusiast market, including that he is "accelerating for the gaming market [...] moving faster than we ever have in product, in release cadence." Given the rumors about Intel's next several generations of CPUs sharing a platform and socket, that's welcome. But there's something else he said that's even more exciting: "... the signal Intel is trying to send is [...] we're gearing up for one of the most significant desktop CPU launches we have ever had."
Those are strong words, but they're likely to be true, at least in a few different regards. Nova Lake is said to be bringing Intel's response to AMD's 3D V-Cache, finally, and it's also said to massively expand the maximum CPU core count available on a desktop CPU, from the 24 cores of current-gen offerings all the way to 52 cores. But there's another feature that has this gamer excited, and it's the return of AVX-512 to Intel consumer platforms.
Hallock didn't say that part, yet it's all but confirmed; that tidbit comes from programmer and serial noticer InstLatX64, who spotted two working desktop Nova Lake processors in Intel's public Intel Graphics Continuous Integration servers. That's the company's automated quality-testing lab where the chipmaker tests upcoming graphics drivers using a farm of real CPU and GPU hardware before code updates are officially released. Spotting Nova Lake in the CI lab is interesting, but the really fascinating part is what the Linux boot logs say about the chips' capabilities:
Indeed, not only does this confirm support for AVX10 vector states on both the P-cores and E-cores (as otherwise there would be no need to inform the operating system about such support), this also confirms support for Intel's Advanced Performance Extensions, or APX. That's the next major architectural extension to the x86-64 instruction set that doubles the number of General Purpose Registers in each CPU core. While it won't do anything until software is compiled to use it, it could result in a major speed-up, especially in nasty client code that is highly sensitive to single-threaded execution latency.
Beyond that, these findings in the Intel GFX CI also validate that Nova Lake lacks Hyper-Threading, and that at least some Nova Lake processors have CPU cores on more than one tile. The line "CPU topo: Max. dies per package: 2" very explicitly denotes that Nova Lake splits its CPU cores across two separate physical compute tiles in the package. Interesting stuff considering the max core count we've seen today is 28 cores.
Finally, these logs confirm that Intel is moving its processor Family ID from Family 6 (first established all the way back in 1995) to Family 18 (0x12 in hexadecimal.) This is actually a pretty big deal. The only other chips Intel made that weren't part of Family 0x06 were the Pentium 4 processors using the Netburst architecture, designated Family 15 (0x0F).
Bumping to 0x12 resets the model count back to zero, but it also serves as a symbolic line in the sand; combined with the fundamental instruction set shifts above, it marks the official end of the legacy P6 lineage and the start of Intel's next-generation CPU foundation. That's why we say Hallock's remarks about "the most significant desktop CPU launches we have ever had" likely aren't mere puffery. We're really looking forward to the launch of these CPUs early next year.
