Intel Nova Lake Tipped For Up To 52 Cores, Faster DDR5 And Big Upgrades

We're welding together a few different Nova Lake rumors in this coverage. Keep in mind that everything here is totally unsubstantiated rumor, so keep the salt shaker handy, but they do come from sources that have been reliable in the past, which is why we're reporting on them. Here's the skinny: Intel's next-generation Nova Lake desktop processors may sport 32 PCIe 5.0 lanes, may use DDR5 memory at 8000 MT/s, and may have as many as 52 cores in a single socket—despite TDP only growing to 150W.

That's basically the summary of the purported leaks from the community over the last couple of days. First up was the man with the infamously-annoying-to-type name chi11eddog (@g01d3nm4ng0 on Xwitter), who dropped a bombshell by posting up a list of basic specifications for Intel Core Ultra processors. We'll just post his list here:


That's right: up to 16 "Coyote Cove" P-cores (not the cancelled "Cobra Core", sadly), 32 "Arctic Wolf" E-cores, and an additional 4 low power E-cores, adding up to a whopping 52 total CPU cores. This seems almost preposterous to us, especially inside a 150W TDP, but the apparent idea is that the top-end Core Ultra 9 and Core Ultra 7 SKUs will use dual compute tiles, meaning that, similar to how a Ryzen 9 9950X is basically two Ryzen 7 9700Xs stapled together, a Nova Lake Core Ultra 9 would essentially be two Core Ultra 5s on one package.

Of course, the LP E-Cores don't change because those are on the SoC tile and exist so that when the system is idle, the processor can turn off the Compute tile—or "tiles", as the case may be. The choice of 14 P-cores instead of 12 on the Core Ultra 7 is interesting, as the number of E-cores lands directly between 16 and 32, yet apparently only two P-cores need to be disabled for yields. We wouldn't be surprised if we see another Core Ultra 7 SKU with twelve P-cores eventually.


Notably, well-known "Korean PC tech fan" 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) asked chi11eddog directly if these parts would come with "bLLC". That stands for either "Big Last-Level Cache" or "Base-tile Last-Level Cache", depending on who you ask, and it has been a long rumored feature dating back to before the original Core Ultra processors (Meteor Lake) even came out. The idea is that Intel's "Base Tile", upon which the rest of the CPU chiplets rest, could contain a very large "L4" or "System-Level" cache. Intel has been experimenting with SLC recently; the Core Ultra 200V chips (Lunar Lake) include such a cache, although it's only 8MB in size.

The bLLC feature, on the other hand, was rumored to be as large as 144 MB, quadrupling the L3 cache of even a Core Ultra 9 285K. That could certainly improve performance in games, much as AMD's 32MB 3D V-Cache has done. Known then as "Adamantine," we first reported on the bLLC feature way back in April of 2023, when it appeared in a Linux patch specifically related to the then-unreleased Meteor Lake CPUs. Adamantine never materialized, but former CEO Pat Gelsinger did confirm that Intel was working on stacked cache in some form for its tiled processors.


It seems likely that we might finally see bLLC come about in a retail product with Nova Lake. Well-known community member and self-described "good at finding stuff online" guy Haze replied to 포시포시's question by remarking that there would be 8P+16e and 8P+12e SKUs within the Nova Lake family with bLLC. Apparently, both chips will come with 125W TDPs. 8 physical cores is widely regarded as a "sweet spot" for a gaming CPU, but it's interesting to note that 8P+16e is a top-end Core Ultra 9 configuration in the current generation of Intel CPUs. Having that shoved all the way down to Core Ultra 5 is fascinating.


Also interesting is this leak from frequent Intel leaker Jaykihn (@jaykihn0 on Xwitter) that purports to reveal the connectivity capabilities of the Nova Lake platform. It's considerably improved over Arrow Lake, with every PCI Express connection on the CPU and a third of the ones from the chipset being PCIe 5.0-capable. That means a desktop Nova Lake machine should offer fully 32 PCIe 5.0 lanes—enough for an x16 graphics card and four PCIe 5.0 SSDs. There are also an additional 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes, though, so we might start to see the return of motherboards with multi-M.2 riser cards.

Besides PCI Express, the leak also notes that Nova Lake supports eight SATA-III ports, five 20Gbps USB ports, a whopping ten 10Gbps USB ports, another ten USB 5Gbps ports, and a full 14 USB2 ports. This is a truly bonkers amount of connectivity, and we suspect that these totals are actually taking into account the fact that some of these lanes are flexible I/O that can be repurposed for various types of connectivity. If the chipset actually supports that much total PCIe and USB, it's going to be massive.


Finally, Jaykihn also remarked that Nova Lake-S desktop processors will support DDR5 memory at 8000 MT/s, albeit with only one DIMM per channel (1DPC) and single-rank (1R) DIMMs at that. This is still very interesting, though, because this would be by far the highest official socketed memory specification on any launched product, and it must be an official spec, because Intel's processors have been exceeding 8000 MT/s with overclocking for quite some time; we've run our own Ultra 9 285K at 8800 MT/s. The extreme memory speed may help overcome some of the memory latency struggles inherent to tile-based processors.

All of this is fascinating, but we have to remind you that Intel has not said a peep about Nova Lake officially. Not only that, but we haven't seen a single leak of a socket, CPU package diagram, motherboard design, box branding, or anything. It has been mentioned in a few leaked materials, like the NEX slide that confirmed the 12 P-core Bartlett Lake CPUs, but aside from that, we don't even have a leaked Geekbench result to go on.

As a result, we're not expecting to see Nova Lake for less than a year from now. Intel is purportedly readying a refresh of its extant Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200 CPUs, but that and the mobile Panther Lake are all we really have visible on the horizon for Intel CPUs. Hopefully Intel confirms some of these specifications sooner than later, because Nova Lake is looking mighty fine from our current perspective.