(Image credit: Intel)

Given the recent news cycle surrounding Intel's administration and its ambivalent future ambitions, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the company lacks proactive plans. However, it remains firmly in the chip making business, and the rumor mill is alive as ever. The Blue Team is working on its upcoming Panther Lake (mobile) lineup at the moment, set to release later this year, but it's next year's Nova Lake that has leaked yet again. This time, we have spied the purported exact core configs of all Nova Lake variants, including the top-end Nova Lake-HX chip.

Coming from reliable tipster Jaykihn, Nova Lake will launch in the usual HX, H, and U variants, each targeting different laptop categories. At the top, the highest-end Nova Lake-HX SKU will feature eight P-Cores, 16 E-Cores, and four low-power LP-E Cores, plus a quad-core Xe3 iGPU—a total of 28 CPU cores when added up. That puts it in the same ballpark as the current Arrow Lake 285HX, albeit with a different balance of high-efficiency cores.

Interestingly, this leak does not mention the Nova Lake-AX chips that surfaced earlier. Recently, reports have suggested these are seemingly on the chopping block already, which means Intel still won't have an answer to AMD's Strix Halo. Still, it paints a better picture than Panther Lake, which won't even have an HX variant, but both will fall far behind the rumored 48-core GPU that we might get with Nova Lake-AX.

The mainstream Nova Lake-H tier will top out at 16 cores (four P-Cores, eight E-Cores, and four LP-E Cores) and offer up to 12 Xe3 GPU cores depending on SKU. These designs share similarities with the previously leaked Panther Lake-H chips, though with different CPU microarchitectures and a slightly altered GPU layout. Anyhow, we then have likely the Nova Lake-U family with a maximum core count of eight (4P+4LP) along with four Xe3 cores going to the iGPU.

On the lowest end, a 2P+4LP model is also expected, carrying only two Xe3 cores, positioned as the successor to Intel’s Wildcat Lake platform, catering to budget notebooks where cost and battery life are the main priorities—justifying its lack of standard E-cores. This also means that, if we believe the leak, every single Nova Lake chip is going to have four LP-E cores.

Speaking of all the cores, the Nova Lake lineup is set to also introduce microarchitectures that diverge from the current Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake lineups. We expect to see Coyote Cove P-Cores and Arctic Wolf E-Cores, alongside Skymont-based LP-E cores. As mentioned previously, the GPU cores are from Intel's Xe3 'Celestial' architecture. We also got rumor-mill confirmation that Nova Lake mobile will not use two compute tiles like its desktop counterpart.

These configs round out the Nova Lake lineup. We've included a table below to better illustrate and compare the specs, but keep in mind that this just a rumor, and a potentially far-fetched one at that. Literally. Because Nova Lake is more than a year away and a lot can change before it actually releases. We're likely going to hear more about Nova Lake in the build up to its launch after Panther Lake—set to debut in the second half of this year—comes out, finally bringing Intel's 18A process node to the market.

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