Sometimes, bigger isn't always strictly better. More cores can equate to a higher power draw, and there's a fine balancing act when building a PC between getting parts that run nice, and ones that don't require a nuclear reactor in your case to work. Intel's upcoming Nova Lake chips seem to be rocking a lot of cores, but whether or not that will be worth it will depend on more than raw figures.
According to @meng59739449, a leaker on X, a shipping manifest included mention of two different Intel Nova Lake chips. The first is a 28-core chip with eight Performance cores, 16 Efficient cores, and four Low-Power E-cores. The second, perhaps the most interesting one, has a pretty chunky 52 cores, with 16 being Performance cores, 32 being Efficient cores, and 4 being Low-Power cores.
This all lines up with rumours from June suggesting the same number of cores. For context on that figure, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K has eight Performance cores and 16 Efficient cores. That means the top model has more than double that amount. That is an impressive jump in raw performance.
This new information was shortly followed by the confirmation of an Engineering Sample (ES) arriving at the end of the year. Given that Nova Lake was previously rumoured to launch in 2026, this lines up with previous reports. Notably, the manifest shows that the new Nova Lake models use an LGA-1954 socket, which is entirely new.
This means, if you upgraded to an LGA-1851 motherboard when it launched in the latter half of 2024, you will now have to go out and buy a new one should you want Nova Lake when it is expected to arrive in 2026.
Nova Lake reportedly operates on a mixture of TSMC's N2 node, as well as Intel's own 18A one. There's a lot riding on 18A, and just this week, Intel's CEO admitted that it 'fumbled the football' with the launch of its Arrow Lake CPUs. Intel claims Nova Lake "is a more complete set of SKUs. It does address the high-end desktop market. And so we would expect that we will improve our position next year. So all in all, I actually feel pretty good about the client."
18A is reported to achieve a peak transistor density around 185 MTr/mm2, which is still behind the likes of TSMC and behind recent 2n rumours from Japanese firm Raipidus. It is supposedly built to optimise performance and efficiency and comes with backside power delivery (BSPDN), which should increase performance-per-watt.
However, Intel's biggest weakness right now isn't the number of cores, as Nick points out, it's instead cache latency. Intel is reportedly introducing a gaming-friendly cache memory tile to rival AMD's rather brilliant X3D chips, but adding more cores can contribute to core-to-core cache access time.
More cores will certainly contribute to a CPU being great in multi-threaded applications, making them particularly good as productivity machines, but for them to compete in the gaming market, they need low-latency data access. This is done through a strong cache structure.
Intel reportedly stated it was looking for "leadership gaming performance" at the end of June, but shoving more cores into its chips isn't how you beat AMD in itself. It will need a smart and optimised bus structure to go with it. Hopefully, the larger range of SKUs will allow some space for a high-end productivity chip and a gaming one alongside it. The next year will be very important for Intel.
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