Intel will reportedly take the fight to AMD's dominant X3D gaming CPUs with monstrous Nova Lake chip packing 288 MB of vertical cache and 52 cores

Intel Core i5 14600K inside a Z790 motherboard. — (Image credit: Future)

Intel is planning to sock it to AMD's dominant X3D CPUs with a 52-core version of its upcoming Nova Lake processor. Incredibly, it's claimed the chip will pack 288 MB of last-level vertical cache memory.

That's well over double the 128 MB of V-Cache currently offered by AMD's top X3D CPU, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This news comes somewhat cryptically from one of the most reliable leakers in the business, kopite7kimi (via WCCFTech).

So, according to this information, the top Intel Nova Lake CPU will have two compute tiles, each with eight Performance and 16 Efficient cores, plus 144 MB of vertical cache or bLLC. That makes for a total of 48 cores and 288 MB of Intel's equivalent to AMD V-Cache. The chips will also have another four low-power Efficient cores located in the SoC tile, making for a grand total of 52 cores (that core count total has appeared in a shipping manifest, too).

Intel office — Will Nova Lake mark Intel's return to form? (Image credit: Intel)

If all this is accurate, it makes for one heck of a broadside on AMD's X3D chips and a serious attempt to regain the gaming performance crown. Indeed, these plans are so aggressive, kopite7kimi claims that they will create problems for motherboard makers.

"The power supply design of the new platform will be a challenge for motherboard manufacturers," kopite7kimi said on X.

Of course, AMD will not be standing still as all this happens. Intel has confirmed that Nova Lake is due out at the end of 2026. But AMD has likewise said it will release its own next-gen Zen 6 CPUs in 2026.

All of which means that next year is shaping up to be a battle royale of the stacked cache gaming CPUs. Let's just hope the memory supply crisis has died down by the time these monster gaming CPUs arrive.

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Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

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