Explore Intel Nova Lake CPUs’ 2026 features

2021 was the year that saw the first discovery of information pertaining to the Nova Lake family of processors developed by Intel. Back then, it was projected that the family would debut in 2025 with a significantly revised Core architecture aimed at the desktop enthusiast market. This was the expectation. This would be analogous to the manner in which AMD’s Ryzen processors of the first generation enhanced overall performance.

There have been no new advancements pertaining to this family since the previous update; however, currently, sources close to Moore’s Law Is Dead claim that Nova Lake is still in the works, despite the fact that its launch window has been unexpectedly shifted to H2 2026. MLID also provides a number of preliminary specifications, although it is highly doubtful that these will be finalized at this juncture due to the vast time horizon.

Nova Lake desktop CPUs

In the second half of the year 2026, Nova Lake, the successor of Arrow Lake Refresh, would be made available for public consumption. It would have up to 180 MB of last level cache, as well as P-cores with a maximum of 16 rentable units, E-cores with a maximum of 32, and LP cores with a maximum of 4. It is possible that it was fabricated utilizing nodes from either Intel’s own 14A manufacturing process or TSMC’s N2P fabrication process.

Even though Intel has claimed that it should no longer be dependent on TSMC’s manufacturing nodes by the year 2025, it looks that Nova Lake may still be built mostly on TSMC’s N2P nodes, if not fully on Intel’s replacement of the 18A node, which MLID refers to as the 14A node. This is despite the fact that Intel has stated that its dependence on TSMC’s manufacturing nodes should halt by the year 2025. Everything rests on whether or not Intel can successfully ramp up manufacturing of angstrom nodes over the next few years.

For the time being, it is projected that Nova Lake will consist of a maximum of sixteen rentable unit performance cores (owing to developments in hyperthreading technology), thirty-two improved efficiency cores known as Arctic Wolf, and four low power efficiency cores. The performance that this core count should deliver should be sufficient to compete with whatever comes after AMD’s Zen6 processors in the year 2026.

This central processing unit (CPU) should be able to compete with whatever comes after AMD’s Zen6 processors because it offers single-thread performance boosts of 20-40% higher than Arrow Lake and a massive boost of 60+% higher than the next Raptor Lake Refresh. It is projected that high-end Core Ultra 9 processors may include as much as 180 MB of cache memory at the very last level, while Core Ultra 7 computers may acquire as much as 144 MB of cache memory.

The information that was received through MLID’s prior leaks indicated that AMD will most likely debut its Zen6 processors by the end of 2025, while the launch of the Zen7 might take place as early as 2027. If Intel were to launch Nova Lake at the end of 2026, the company’s primary objective would be to play catch-up and unseat Zen6 as the market leader, not Zen7.

Because of this, Intel’s release schedule would become wildly out of sync, and the company would continue to lag behind AMD by one step for the foreseeable future. This would put Intel in a worse position than AMD.

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