Intel Roadmap Leak Reveals Nova Lake Branding And 52-Core Flagship Delay

We have a fair bit of information on Intel's upcoming Nova Lake processors, including that the chips will top out at 52 cores and some 474W power draw, as well as what seems to be a fairly complete list of SKUs for the desktop family. However, we didn't know what branding it would actually use until now. Our friends over at VideoCardz have revealed the first bit of Nova Lake-S marketing material, and it's the processor logo for the chips. This confirms the "Core Ultra Series 4" branding that folks expected, but that's not all the information that the boys over there had to share.

Along with the branding for the new series, VCZ also shared that it has come into possession of supposed news, review, and sales embargo windows for "several Nova Lake-S packages." The site explains that "These ranges cover several embargo stages rather than one specific release date," which is to say that it's not actually clear when during each period Intel will actually be releasing the CPU, but the windows are still informative.


According to the supposed leak, the "28-core DS package" is listed for embargos starting in January and extending through March. The overclockable 28-core models, the "K" SKUs, are apparently coming between March and April, and then the lower-end 16-core and 8-core models will file in between March and May. The much-discussed 52-core package apparently won't show up until later next year, with an embargo window that reaches from May to September.

That's pretty interesting considering that AMD is expected to launch 24-core Zen 6 CPUs either very late this year or (more likely) early next year. While a 24-core Zen 6 CPU will obviously have fewer CPU cores than a 28-core Nova Lake chip, we've heard this song before. AMD's chips, at least on desktop, are using a homogenous pile of "big" cores, and even now, the company's 16-core Zen 5 processors compete well with Intel's 24-core Arrow Lake CPUs. With a smaller core count advantage, Nova Lake had better really bring the sauce.


"DS" is a new appellation for us with regard to Intel CPUs; VCZ says that it normally (but not always) refers to chips with dual compute tiles. Given that Intel has not yet shipped any client processors with dual compute tiles, it's easy to understand why we weren't familiar with it. As far as we know, the 28-core Nova Lake CPUs were thought to use a single compute tile, but it's possible there's something being lost in translation here. These are leaks, after all. In any case, if you were hot to trot for a 52-core Intel CPU, it looks like you might be waiting for a good little while.