Intel’s Nova Lake family was first released in 2021 and was expected to launch back in 2025 with a heavily redesigned core architecture for the enthusiast desktop market, similar to how the first generation of Ryzen improved AMD’s performance. No further updates have been made to this family since then, but sources close to Moore’s Law Is Dead say today that Nova Lake is still in the works and its launch has been pushed back to H2 2026. MLID also provides some preliminary specifications that are unlikely to be set in stone given the advanced time horizon.
Even though Intel has stated that it plans to end its dependence on TSMC by 2025, it appears that Nova Lake could still be partially built on TSMC’s TSMC N2P production nodes, or even entirely on TSMC’s Node 18A successor. Intel (MLID calls it 14A). It all depends on the ability of Intel’s Angstrom nodes to ramp up in the next few years.
Currently, Nova Lake is expected to offer up to 16 commendable performance cores (new hyperthreading technology), 32 efficiency-enhancing cores (codenamed Arctic Wolf), and 4 low-power cores. This number of cores should provide enough performance to compete with AMD’s Zen6 processors in 2026, with performance increases of 20-40% on individual threads compared to AMD’s Zen6 Arrow Lake processors and an impressive improvement of more than 60 % compared to the upcoming Raptor Lake Refresh processor. High-end Core Ultra 9 processors are expected to have up to 180MB of last-level cache, while Core Ultra 7 models could benefit from 144MB.
From what we have learned from previous leaks, MLIDaMD is expected to launch its Zen6 processors in late 2025, while Zen7 could launch in 2027. When Intel launches Nova Lake in late 2026, it will actually try to catch up and dethrone Zen6, not Zen7. Therefore, Intel’s release schedule could be significantly out of sync and lag behind AMD in the next few years.
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