Intel Nova Lake-AX — 28 processor cores, 48 GPU cores Xe3, but may not work

The market for high-performance mobile processors is hot right now. AMD has shown the class with powerful Strix Halo, Apple continues to develop its M-series chip line, while Intel… has temporarily lost momentum and has a huge gap in the APU segment. But it looks like this may change. The specifications of the upcoming Nova Lake-AX — chip have been leaked, and it could be Intel’s most powerful mobile processor ever. If it is released. Anyway, Intel’s Nova Lake-AX specs have already been leaked, although the Raichu insider has since removed his post.

According to Raichu, the Nova Lake-AX will feature a massive 28-core CPU configuration on a single compute tile unit. Such a chip includes:

• 8 performance cores (P-Cores),
• 16 energy-efficient (E-Cores),
• 4 ultralight cores (LP-Cores).

The cores are likely to be based on the Coyote Cove and Arctic Wolf architectures. As in the Lunar Lake series, these cores will not support Hyper-Threading multithreading technology — Intel has chosen the path of energy efficiency.

But the most important thing is not even this, but the graphics subsystem. Intel Nova Lake-AX will allegedly have 384 GPU computing units — that’s 48 Xe-core (with a structure of 8 units per core) based on Intel Xe3 architecture. This is more than 2 times the number of cores in the Intel Arc B580 desktop graphics card, which has 20 Xe cores. This should provide a significant performance boost compared to Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake chips. Perhaps even AMD’s Strix Halo chips will have a hard time competing with this monster, with up to 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units. To add, the processor Apple M4 Pro has up to 20 graphics cores, Lunar Lake — 64 computing units in total. If all of this proves to be true, Nova Lake-AX will be able to offer the most powerful GPU among x86 chips with integrated graphics.

To support this GPU performance, Nova Lake-AX will support LPDDR5X memory with up to 9600 MT/s (and possibly — even up to 10667 MT/s) over a 256-bit bus. This is faster than AMD’s Strix Halo (8000 MT/s) and ahead of Apple’s M-series, which has a narrower bus, although the memory speed reaches 8533 MT/s.

It is expected that new Nvidia N1 APU chip with Grace CPU and Blackwell GPU will have similar performance. But its characteristics have not yet been disclosed.

And now, after a big barrel of honey, let’s move on to the fly in the ointment.

According to Raichu, the development of Nova Lake-AX is currently on hold. Earlier, there were rumors that Intel «had put the project on hold» while revising its customer solution roadmap. That is, it is unclear whether this chip will ever go on sale.

Even if Nova Lake-AX never reaches users, the very fact of its development is a signal that Intel is seriously preparing for revenge in the segment of high-performance mobile processors. AMD is already leading the pack with Strix Halo in Windows devices, Apple is putting pressure with its M-chips, and Nvidia may soon come out with its own hybrid solution. Intel must either launch Nova Lake-AX or create an even better analog. Otherwise, it will have no place under the sun in this segment.

Source: tomshardware