Nova Lake-AX: Intel is apparently working on a competitor to AMD's Strix Halo
According to rumor mongers, Intel is working on a powerful combination processor to take on AMD's Ryzen AI Max and Apple Pro CPUs.
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Powerful combo processors have been powering gaming consoles for a long time and have been found in all MacBooks since Apple started building its own CPUs. Although they are technically integrated graphics units and this classification has a nimbus attached to it, they deliver 3D performance suitable for gaming and CAD because the GPUs are generously dimensioned instead of ascetic.
However, such chips are still rare in Windows PCs: With AMD's Strix Halo aka Ryzen AI Max, a representative was only introduced at the beginning of 2025, which you can now buy in some notebooks and mini PCs. Now rumor mongers are reporting that Intel is also working on such a chip. The code name Nova Lake-AX is doing the rounds.
This immediately tells industry experts that the powerful combination chip is not just around the corner. The current Core Ultra 200 processors are the separate Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) and Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200U, 200H and 200HX) series. The successor Panther Lake (probably Core Ultra 300) is officially due before the end of 2025, although it is more likely to be 2026 in retail. Only its successor generation is called Nova Lake (Core Ultra 400?), which will then include the AX special edition. We are therefore talking about mid-2026 at the earliest, with a strong tendency towards much later.
Alleged specifications
Nova Lake-AX is said to have a total of 28 cores. Specifically, the total is said to consist of eight performance cores, 16 efficiency cores and four low-power efficiency cores. AMD's Strix Halo has 16 cores, all of which are identical to the Zen 5 architecture. For the GPU, 384 execution units are being discussed. Assuming that eight units are assigned to each GPU core in the planned Xe3 architecture as before, that would be 48 Xe cores.
For comparison: Lunar Lake is currently the most powerful integrated GPU with just eight Xe cores, while Panther Lake is said to have up to 12 Xe cores. AMD's Strix Halo comes with a maximum of 40 so-called compute units (CUs) – AMD's equivalent to Intel's Xe cores –, which corresponds to the expansion of mid-range graphics cards. Strix Point for normal notebooks (Ryzen 9) has 12 CPU cores and 16 CUs, the smaller expansion stage Krackan Point (Ryzen 7 and below) for the mass market has eight CPU cores and CUs each.
Remarkably, the leaker who leaked the technical details of Nova Lake-AX does not believe that the chip will actually see the light of day. The background to this is probably that Intel is currently cutting numerous business areas and cutting jobs in order to become profitable again. Nova Lake-AX, like Strix Halo, would be innovative, but still a niche product for the time being – the red pencils from controlling are traditionally loose with something like this.
The combos are coming
On the other hand, Intel must not miss out on the branching off into the future, and that clearly means powerful combination processors for notebooks. Apple has been forging ahead with its Pro, Max and Ultra processors since 2020. AMD is currently playing the Windows world with Strix Halo alone and could already have its successor Medusa Halo with Zen 6 cores and integrated RDNA4 GPU at the start in the period in which Nova Lake-AX is expected.
AMD currently has to shoulder the entire enablement of the new technology and push Microsoft in the right direction. The concept of shared memory, which goes hand in hand with powerful combo chips, has only been implemented in a rudimentary way: there is physically shared memory, but not logically. Under Windows, the memory is still partitioned into separate areas for CPU and GPU, so that existing software cannot get out of step. The actual unified memory idea that both computing units can access the same objects without having to copy them from one exclusive memory area to the other is currently not usable under Windows.
Growth in Windows on ARM
AMD will not remain alone in the Windows world. It is an open secret that Nvidia also wants to get involved. Its chip with ARM processor cores and Blackwell GPU is codenamed N1X. It should have been on the market a long time ago, but is being pushed back further and further: We were recently told by industry sources that the market launch of such notebooks is unlikely to take place before the second quarter of 2026 (and that of the weaker N1 variant even later). At Computex in May, there was still talk of the first quarter of 2026.
N1X is likely to be closely related to GB10, which powers the DGX Spark mini workstation. Nvidia presented this at the CES technology trade fair in January; other manufacturers such as Asus, Dell and HP are also launching their own versions. However, it is not yet known when sales will actually start. According to our research, the chip had to go through an extra round of development because the display controller was not working properly. Device manufacturers hoped at Computex that it would be launched in the third quarter, which has now begun.
Incidentally, DGX Spark will run under Linux, not Windows, although all device manufacturers want this in order to be able to offer their customers more choice. Side note: A previously existing, but never officially confirmed exclusive agreement between Microsoft and Qualcomm regarding Windows on ARM (which would also be the right version for Nvidia) should have expired by now, but without competitor processors ready to go, this doesn't mean much in practice.
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Near future
Speaking of Qualcomm, we are very excited to see what the company has up its sleeve for the second generation of the Snapdragon X, which will debut at this year's Snapdragon Summit in the fall. At the top of the wish list is a more powerful graphics unit for both normal and particularly powerful combination processors. The technology for this must inevitably come from the company's own ranks: Nvidia is staking its own WoA claim with N1X, while AMD has its own roadmap with its Halo chips.
In this respect, Intel would certainly do well to bring a product like Nova Lake-AX to market maturity: The competition is not sleeping, on the contrary, it is actually getting bigger. What's more, Intel probably already had something planned for the current Arrow Lake generation that never saw the light of day.
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