Intel promises 'leadership across the board on desktop' when its next-gen Nova Lake CPU launches in late 2026

Intel's been on a roll of late in all the wrong ways. Borked CPUs, failing fabs, haemorrhaging cash, run-ins with the President of the USA. The woes never end. Until next year, that is, and the launch of Nova Lake. That's right, peeps, when Intel's next-gen CPU architecture arrives at the end of 2026, Intel will ascend to a leadership position across the board on desktop.

To quote John Pitzer, Intel's Corporate Vice President of Corporate Planning & Investor Relations, precisely, "as Nova Lake comes out at the end of next year into 2027, I think we're going to have a leadership position across the board on desktop."

That is one heck of a bold claim, even for a chip that's rumoured to pack up to 52 cores. Of course, it will at least in part hinge on the quality of Intel's upcoming 18A process, the node formerly known as the one upon which Pat Gelsinger bet the entire company, but latterly more of a stepping stone back to profitability, with 14A being the node on which Intel's hopes to build chips for customers now depends on.

Unsurprisingly, Pitzer is bullish on 18A, too. He says Intel is planning to spend heavily on tooling up to produce lots of chips on 18A and return Intel to profitability. Famously, or you might say notoriously, both of Intel's latest CPU families, namely Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, are largely manufactured by TSMC.

Intel will start the process of moving that production in-house with Panther Lake. However, Panther Lake is a mobile CPU and is also aimed at more power-efficient laptops as opposed to larger desktop-replacement rigs. More to the point, it's thought only certain versions of Panther Lake will have CPU dies made by Intel. The bulk of production may well end up being handled by Taiwanese chip foundry TSMC.

In other words, Panther Lake will only entail fairly limited quantities of Intel's 18A silicon. That changes with Nova Lake. "Nova Lake itself being both a notebook and a desktop part has pretty meaningful implications for the amount of wafer starts that we need on 18A," Pitzer says.

And that should mean improved profitability because it means Intel won't have to pay those pricey TSMC wafer fees. "As you look at it through the lens of Intel Foundry, the move from Intel 7 to Intel 18A, ASPs per wafer will go up three times faster than their cost. And so just driving more volume through the fab on 18A is a pretty profitable dynamic for Intel Foundry," Pitzer.

Morever, Pitzer says Intel can get back to making money just by executing on its own products, it doesn't absolutely need to win big foundry customers. "We don't need to see a lot of external foundry revenue to breakeven exiting 2027," he says.

The question is, can Intel actually deliver on its own products? If you examine Intel's recent CPU families, it's not altogether promising. The Raptor Lake generation has turned out to suffer from major bugs, the Meteor Lake mobile architecture was underwhelming, and Intel's latest desktop chips, known as Arrow Lake arrived half baked and even after a little tweaking remain well behind AMD by most estimates.

The only unambiguous exception to all that has been Lunar Lake, which is a decent low-power mobile CPU, but according to Intel itself, isn't a money spinner on account of being made mostly by TSMC and having integrated memory, which limits configuration options for laptop makers.

We'll get an initial feel for whether Intel is getting back on track with Panther Lake at the end of this year, which will be our first taste of the 18A process. But that's another low-power CPU. So, it will really be Nova Lake at the end of 2026; that's the real test.

Nova Lake will span the whole gambit from lower-power laptops to high-performance desktops and is shaping up to be an absolutely vital processor family for Intel. Nova Lake simply has to be at least competitive with AMD if Intel is going to turn things around.

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