It turns out that Intel did have an answer to AMD’s Strix Halo family of big APUs (officially the Ryzen AI Max series), dubbed Nova Lake-AX, with some fairly potent specs to boot. However, leaker @OneRaichu believes that Team Blue has abandoned this design.
The Big Nova Lake That (Allegedly) Never Came To Be
First, let’s talk about what Nova Lake-AX is. Built as a response to Strix Halo (or, more likely, its next-generation equivalents), it features 28-core CPU in 8P+16E+4LPE configuration, an Xe3P-based GPU with 384 Execution Units, and LPDDR5X support with clock speeds up to 10,667MT/s via a 256-bit memory bus. As far as memory subsystem goes, this is significantly faster than Strix Halo’s LPDDR5X-8000 configuration.
This chip, had it been realized as a product, will serve in the same segment as AMD’s Strix Halo does today, which is lightweight, high-performance laptops. Think the likes of ROG Flow Z13 and HP ZBook Ultra – both compact laptops that pack big performance for gaming and workstation use. As a matter of fact, Strix Halo was created in part as a response to Apple’s highly-successful M-series SoCs, which gave MacBooks a significant leg up in power efficiency and battery life.
Furthermore, even NVIDIA is known to join this market with the planned N1/N1x chips, developed in collaboration with MediaTek; and that means three of the four major chipmakers have already invested into system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. Intel right now is in a difficult financial state, so it has to weigh its options carefully in terms of what product to invest on – and it looks like Nova Lake-AX shouldn’t be the ones on the chopping block if this is where the PC industry is heading.
Pokdepinion: Hopefully Intel reconsiders this.
