Recently a rumor leak emerged from leaker @jaykihn0 on X/Twitter stating that the upcoming Intel Nova Lake architecture, expected to succeed Arrow Lake (part of Core Ultra 200 series), will feature up to 52 cores. This leak largely corroborates with an earlier leak, although this time an extra cluster of low-power E-cores is mentioned.
Nova Lake’s Core Count Bonanza
According to the leaker, the entire Nova Lake lineup will include four extra LPE-cores, which is also found on Intel’s Meteor Lake (Core Ultra 100) series processors. This, on top of the existing core count configuration reported earlier, means the desktop lineup (NVL-SK) will see a combination of 2 CPU tiles, each containing 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores, plus 4 LPE-cores in the SoC tile totaling 52 cores; the laptop NVL-HX series will feature 28 cores (8P+16E+4LPE), while NVL-S and NVL-H, both for mainstream laptops, will pack 16 cores (4P+8E+4LPE).
LPE-cores has been notably absent on Arrow Lake as the chipmaker said the vastly improved E-core architecture is good enough to cover both the performance and efficiency aspects of the chip, though the re-introduction of the cluster will now also include desktop chips, where its benefits are still unclear. There’s also mentions of a massive 144MB cache pool, which is the main reason that made AMD’s 3D V-Cache processors incredibly successful in recent years.
Still, as Intel has yet to announce tape-out for this architecture, this means all of the specs can still change depending on the development process. The lineup is expected to power the Core Ultra 400 series, succeeding the Core Ultra 300 series which is speculated to feature a refreshed Arrow Lake architecture.
Pokdepinion: That’s a lot of cores.
