Intel’s lack of a proper answer to AMD’s Strix Halo—and by extension, Apple’s M-series—has left a clear gap in the high-end APU space. The Blue Team hasn’t seriously competed in the graphics-focused mobile market for a while, but that might be about to change. Just yesterday, “Nova Lake-AX” leaked as a potential return to form, marking what could be Intel’s most capable mobile chip to date; just the ace needed to stir up the market again. Now, we have a full spec breakdown, and it paints a very different picture of what’s coming.
The details come courtesy of leaker Raichu in a now-deleted tweet, a reliable name in the Intel rumor mill. According to him, Nova Lake-AX features a massive 28-core CPU layout on a single compute tile, instead of the two we're expecting on the upcoming Nova Lake-S desktop lineup. It's comprised of 8 P-Cores, 16 E-Cores, and 4 LP-Cores, likely based on the rumored Coyote Cove and Arctic Wolf architectures. Similar to Lunar Lake, these cores will lack hyperthreading in order to gain some efficiency. Still, Intel appears to be targeting hybrid compute performance at a scale we haven’t seen from its mobile segment before. Yet, the CPU isn't even the most interesting bit—that designation would go to the GPU.
