Huge Intel Nova Lake Leak: Core Ultra 400 Series Packs Up to 52 Cores

If you read this site regularly, you'll already be well-informed about Intel's upcoming Nova Lake family of processors; at least, as well-informed as it's possible to be from early leaks and rumors. We have another such leak on the news desk today, this time coming from Videocardz, which has exclusively leaked what it calls a "preliminary SKU list" for the Core Ultra 400 series. Indeed, this is Nova Lake-S, the next desktop CPU family from Intel.

Truth be told, if you've been following the leaks and rumors to this point, there really isn't a lot of information in the post that will be surprising to you. Key points according to the leakers: Nova Lake-S will be branded Core Ultra 400, it will use the "Coyote Cove" architecture for its P-cores and "Arctic Wolf" for its E-cores, it will support DDR5 memory at up to 8000MT/s, it will come with a new-generation NPU, and it will have up to 52 CPU cores. There's a lot more to talk about than just that, though.

Here's the chart with the most relevant information on it; if you've been following the leaks and rumors, this probably has what you want to know. If you're confused by the chart, well, let us explain.


Nova Lake is said to be a chiplet-based processor like all of Intel's current offerings. The SoC tile includes a cluster of four Arctic Wolf E-cores that run at low clock rates; these are the LP E-cores featured on every SKU. The rest of the CPU cores are on a dedicated compute tile, similar to the Core Complex Dice (CCDs) found in Ryzen processors. That's not new; what is new is that Nova Lake can hook up to two compute tiles, and those compute tiles can be "DS" designs that include an extremely large last-level cache—the so-called "bLLC."

The compute tiles apparently come in four different configurations: one with just four P-cores, one with four P-cores and eight E-cores, one with eight P-cores and 16 E-cores, and then one with the same CPU configuration but including the extra cache. No word on what L3 cache allotments look like for anything besides the "bLLC" version, but the leaker did share that all chips will come with 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity as well as two Thunderbolt 5 ports, although the TB5 ports will apparently be provided by an external controller.

Purportedly, all models save for one will come with a Xe3-based GPU that sports a whopping two Xe cores. Well, that's big enough for desktop use, anyway. The one without will be a variant of the top-end Core Ultra 5 model with 22 cores; at least, that's the only one currently marked down for a GPU-less configuration. In the comments of the post, leaker Jaykihn reaffirms that the PL2 value (short-period booost power) on the top-end parts is 471W when in Performance mode.

Arguably what is the most interesting information has nothing to do with the specifications. Videocardz says that Nova Lake will support ECC memory, four display pipes on the integrated GPU, and most surprisingly, forward socket compatibility, which means that future Intel CPUs will slot into the same socket. We heard this before, but having it corroborated from a second source (especially when Intel rarely puts that kind of thing on roadmaps) is pretty exciting.