Lots of new information have emerged in the past two days detailing the potential capabilities of Intel’s next-gen Nova Lake-S (desktop) processors, some of which are quite a massive leap if they are indeed true. For starters, this lineup – expected to be designated as Core Ultra 300 series – will pack 52 cores in a single chip for its maxed-out configuration.
Big Nova Lake Leaks
This part of the leak comes courtesy of X/Twitter user chi11eddog, pertaining to the core counts – a total of seven variants are currently being worked on, with the flagship Core Ultra 9 model combining 16 P-Cores, 32 E-Cores, and an additional 4 Low-Power E-Cores to form a massive 52-core CPU. Next in line is the Core Ultra 7 with 14P+24E+4LPE totaling 42 cores, and both chips will run at a higher 150W TDP. The remaining SKUs in Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 3 will range from 8P+16E+4LPE (28 cores) down to 4P+4E+4LPE (12 cores), sticking to 125W and 65W TDPs respectively.
We already know that Nova Lake will move to a new socket, and with this comes several big upgrades for the platforms these chips will be running on. The default memory speed is expected to be raised to 8000MT/s as default (per Jaykihn on X/Twitter), which suggests that CUDIMMs will be the recommended memory option for these systems. It is worth noting that this only applies to 1DPC (DIMMs per channel) configuration, meaning two sticks of RAM per system in the same memory channel. The specs for 2DPC (4-stick) configuration is still not known at this time, however.
Another major upgrade of the platform is the PCIe specs: Nova Lake will feature significantly more PCIe 5.0 lanes, 36 of them to be exact. Among those 36 lanes available, 24 will be from CPU (same as Arrow Lake), with 4 lanes for DMI as the backhaul for chipset, and another 8 lanes coming from the chipset. This allows the system to install one PCIe 5.0-supported GPU alongside a maximum of three PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Besides these, the chipset will also supply another 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes – so expect these motherboards to feature plenty of PCIe and SSD slots onboard.
Pokdepinion: A lot of big upgrades, which I like.
