Intel's 52-Core Nova Lake CPU May Require A Premium Motherboard For Full Power

So, this one's really straightforward. If you've kept up with news about Intel's Nova Lake—its next-next-gen desktop processors—you'll have already heard that the chip is said to support the use of two compute tiles, much as AMD's desktop processors can use two CCDs for additional cores. The full-fat Nova Lake compute tile is said to have 24 CPU cores; with the four LP-E cores on the SoC tile, we're looking at a whopping 52 CPU cores in one consumer desktop socket.


Given that we've already told you that scuttlebutt says the top-end 52-core SKUs will draw upwards of 700 watts, well, it should probably come as no surprise that only high-end motherboards are said to support the full performance of those processors. 700 watts is truly an absurd number for CPU power. It's entirely possible to reach those numbers (and much more) with the many-core Threadripper and Xeon processors, but a "standard" desktop CPU drawing that much power is almost unheard-of, even with exotic cooling.

Processors get their power from motherboards, and specialized circuitry is used to regulate the power entering the CPU socket. This "power delivery" hardware is typically rated for a few hundred watts at a maximum, because while even the fastest modern CPUs rarely reach those lofty heights for long, they can occasionally see high burst power, known as transient loads. Insufficient power delivery hardware can result in voltage droop, which in turn can cause silent data corruption, especially if one or more cores are rather marginal (or "mercurial," to borrow a term from Google.)


If kopite7kimi's statement that "the power consumption of a full-load NVL-K is over 700 watts" is true, then it's going to require a pretty beefy power delivery circuit to feed such a chip. Those complex designs and the components that compose them add onto a board's bill of materials; it's not an exaggeration to say that a grossly overbuilt voltage regulator is one of the key drivers of motherboard cost in premium PC motherboards. If these chips are really hitting "over 700 watts" with unlocked power limits, a typical 6+1-phase power delivery design is simply not going to cut it for those chips.

Of course, there will be many lower-end configurations of Nova Lake, but the latest leaks suggest that only the top-end dual-compute-tile versions of Nova Lake will have access to the bLLC feature. (Videocardz disagrees.) If you want the best gaming performance ever out of an Intel CPU, be prepared to dig deep into those pockets for both the processor itself (a pair of ~150mm² compute tiles on TSMC N2 won't come cheap) as well as the requisite high-end motherboard to host the chip.