Intel's freshly uploaded fourth-quarter 2024 "CEO/CFO earnings call comments" document has revealed grand CPU-related plans for 2025 and beyond. One of Team Blue's interim leaders—Michelle Johnston Holthaus—believes that "Nova Lake" processors (a next-generation client family) will arrive in 2026, following a comprehensive rollout of "Panther Lake" CPU products. This official timeline matches previously leaked and rumored development schedules—most notably, in a shipping manifest that was discovered last week. In recent times, industry watchdogs have linked "Nova Lake" to Intel's own 14A node and a TSMC 2 nm process node. Additionally, tipsters pointed to an apparent selection of Coyote Cove performance cores and Arctic Wolf efficiency-oriented cores.

Following yesterday's official announcements, a leaker shared several insights—theorized core configurations and manufacturing details were posted on the Hardware subreddit. Community members were engaged in a debate over Intel's "killing of Falcon Shore," but a plucky contributor—going under the moniker "Exist50"—redirected conversation to all-things "Nova Lake." They believe that Intel has shifted all "compute dies to TSMC" for manufacturing, after a change in plans—initial designs had the "8+16 die" on TSMC's N2P, and the "4+8 die on Intel 18A." Exist50 seemed to have inside track knowledge of product ranges: "Nova Lake (NVL) has a unified HUB/SoC die across mobile and desktop. So yeah, the baseline there is 4+8+4. But there's at least one more die for mobile." The flagship desktop (NVL-S or NVL-SK) chip's configuration could feature as many as sixteen performance cores and thirty-two efficiency cores, due to tile reuse—2x (8P+16E). Exist50 advised Intel CPU enthusiasts to forgo current generation offerings. "Nova Lake" should be: "quite a jump from Arrow Lake (ARL) in terms of MT performance, to say the least. I think anyone who buys ARL will end up regretting it, big time!"Based on the leaker's information, VideoCardz has kindly compiled this data into a stack of Intel "Nova Lake" product tiers with "matching" core configurations:

• NVL-SK: 2x (8P+16E)
• NVL-HX: 1x (8P+16E)
• NVL-S/NVL-H: 4P+8E
• NVL-U: 4P+OE

Their summary stated: "it is now claimed that Intel is working on several Nova Lake variants, including desktop, high-end mobile, and mainstream mobile platforms...The Nova Lake-HX platform for enthusiast gaming laptops is expected to feature 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores. This suggests that Intel may no longer use the same dies for S (desktop) and HX (mobile) platforms. Additionally, there is mention of other S and H variants that would stick to a 4P + 8E configuration. Intel is also expected to launch a 4-core variant for low-power laptops."