4 days ago
Intel Nova Lake CPUs Could Have Up to 52 Cores, Support DDR5 8000
Hardware leakers have released a torrent of new rumors about Intel's next-generation Nova Lake desktop processors, and they paint a very impressive picture of this future chip design. Reportedly, the flagship CPU will feature as many as 52 cores, spread across performance, efficiency, and low-power core architectures. They will also see a substantial upgrade in memory support, officially able to handle up to DDR5-8000 chips—though overclocking and XMP profiles should let installed memory perform even faster.
When they launch sometime next year, Nova Lake CPUs will probably be named Core Ultra 300, so these latest leaks detailing the various specs will probably start with a Core Ultra 9 385K. It allegedly sports 16 P cores, 32 E cores, and four LP cores, giving it an unprecedented 52 cores in total. That's more than three times the current top core count AMD alternative, and more than double Intel's 285K. It's not the only next-gen chip that blows past everything else out there right now, either.
The Core Ultra 7 model will have lots of cores too. It'll get 14 P cores, 24 E cores, and four LPE cores. Indeed, those four LPE cores extend throughout the entire stack. That should help improve multi-threaded performance, particularly for the very low-end chips, but will also dramatically improve energy efficiency at idle and in low-power modes for the entire lineup.
If these leaks prove accurate, this will be the first Core Ultra 5 (or Core i5) generation of Intel CPUs to offer eight P cores, though this time around the top Core Ultra 5 will also get 16 E cores, delivering potentially unheard-of levels of multi-threading performance from such modest chips.
Alongside the news of high core counts, VideoCardz also reports that the next-gen Nova Lake CPUs will have official support for DDR5 8000, a big upgrade over the 6400 MT/s memory the current-generation Arrow Lake CPUs support. Considering we already see some Intel motherboards supporting RAM in excess of 9,000 MT/s on Arrow Lake CPUs, it's possible we could see the first 10,000 MT/s or higher overclocking support on Nova Lake.
PCIe 5 will see a big uptick with this generation, too. Instead of the 20 PCIe 5 lanes that Arrow Lake has right now, Nova Lake could offer up to 36, as well as additional PCIe 4 lanes for more legacy device support. Your cooler should work just fine on Nova Lake, too.
All of this is mere rumor for now, but the details are starting to coalesce around a very intriguing generation of CPUs. If Intel can stick the landing, Nova Lake is shaping up to be very interesting competition for AMD's current CPU dominance, particularly in gaming.
