Intel’s next-gen Nova Lake-S CPUs, set to succeed the Arrow Lake series, are poised to revolutionize the desktop CPU landscape. This news comes from leaker “Jaykhin” on X, who revealed that Nova Lake will be Intel’s next-gen consumer desktop platform, while Panther Lake will be exclusively for mobile devices. This echoes Intel’s strategy with Meteor Lake for mobile and Arrow Lake for desktop. The upcoming LGA 1851 platform will debut with the Core Ultra 200 series “Arrow Lake” CPUs, with Nova Lake-S launching later and utilizing the same socket. Dell, in May, leaked that Panther Lake laptops would arrive in 2026, followed by Nova Lake CPUs in 2027. While these advancements are still years away, the anticipation is building.
The rumors surrounding Nova Lake have been circulating for over two years, with initial whispers suggesting a massive architectural shift since the Core architecture’s introduction in 2006. Intel aims to build an entirely new architecture from the ground up, similar to Ryzen, promising up to a 50% performance improvement over Lunar Lake. This significant overhaul is also why Glenn Hinton returned to Intel. The CPU Tile on Nova Lake, utilizing TSMC’s future 2nm process node, will be crucial for Intel.
Before that, we will see the release of Intel’s next-gen Lunar Lake CPUs, available in both mobile and desktop versions, built on TSMC’s new 3nm process node. Lunar Lake will also feature an upgraded NPU 4.0 (Neural Processing Unit) for AI performance, significantly surpassing the capabilities of Meteor Lake, which was launched as the first-gen Core Ultra CPUs at CES 2024.
This move to TSMC for Nova Lake is intriguing, considering Intel’s own “superior” Intel 18A process, which is set for production in the second half of this year. The performance improvements that Nova Lake will bring remain a mystery, but it is during this period that Intel hopes to reclaim its dominance over AMD and their powerful Ryzen CPUs.
