Intel confirms new CPU architecture "Nova Lake" for 2026

Following the announcement of the latest persistently poor quarterly figures, Intel's management team, as usual, gave analysts some more far-reaching information in a conference call. It wasn't just about finances, interim product head Michelle Holthaus also officially announced the new Nova Lake architecture for the first time without being asked. It is set to come onto the market in 2026 as the successor to Panther Lake. The latter is still scheduled for release in the second half of 2025.

Technical details were only available on the already known production process of Panther Lake. It is Intel's first product in 18A. According to the transcript (PDF), Holthaus also referred to Panther Lake as the “lead product” for this process. The Clearwater Forest processor family with many efficiency cores for servers has been postponed to 2026. It replaces the current Sierra Forest and also uses 18A technology.

Apart from the release date, there was no further information on Nova Lake, except that, according to the Intel manager, the architecture will be used “for the entire PC portfolio”, i.e., from light notebooks to large desktop PCs. Panther Lake is probably only intended for notebooks.

Rumors of 48 cores for Nova Lake in the desktop

However, well-known leakers on Reddit and the X platform claim to have discovered more specifications. In the former service, “Exist50” wrote that there are to be various compute dies for Nova Lake, all of which are to be manufactured at TSMC. The comment has since been deleted. A new manufacturing process, presumably from the 2-nanometer generation, will double the number of cores in the top model for desktops: there is talk of two compute dies, each with eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, i.e., a total of 48 CPU cores.

Together with the abbreviation for Nova Lake, this is also referred to as “NVL-SK: 2 x (8P+16E)”. The leaker “HXL” on X also describes the NVL-SK in a slightly different way, namely, without the brackets. Intel could use a single 24-core die for high-end notebooks.

For the NVL-HX, NVL-H and NVL-U notebook processors, the leakers predict configurations of a maximum of 8P+16E – as previously – and a minimum of four P-cores and without E-cores. It is striking that the particularly economical low-power E-cores are no longer included. One reason may be that a new IO tile is to be developed for Nova Lake – based on rumors –. In the current processors, the “lower-power e-cores” are located in this I/O tile and are deactivated in the desktops and only activated in some notebook CPUs.

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