Intel's new Nova Lake CPU claimed to have superior IPC performance to AMD's next-gen Zen 6 as rumour mill goes into overdrive with talk of higher core counts and an APU with a massive iGPU

A close-up, detailed photo of a delidded Intel Core Ultra 200S processor, codenamed Arrow Lake, showing the structures of each tile comprising the processor.

Rumours around Intel's next-gen Nova Lake CPUs have multiplied rapidly in recent days. Highlights include an IPC performance advantage over AMD's upcoming Zen 6 chips, a core count upgrade for some models, and a massive APU variant to take on AMD's Strix Halo or its successor.

First up, those IPC claims. IPC refers to instructions per clock, and it's essentially a measure of how much work a CPU core does in each clock cycle. It's not a measure of overall performance, because IPC combines with clock speed to determine actual performance.