A fresh Intel CPU leak has given us the clearest picture yet of what the company’s next generation of desktop gaming PC processors will deliver in its bid to beat the all-conquering AMD Ryzen X3D range. Like AMD’s X3D chips, cache is king with this new release, but Intel is also bringing loads of CPU cores to the party, in what’s expected to be called the Intel Core Ultra 400 range.
Based on a new CPU architecture with the codename Intel Nova Lake-S, this new range of chips will be bidding to be the best gaming CPU options around when they’re expected to launch at the end of the year. We’ve previously seen Nova Lake leaks detailing the core count and massive amounts of cache, but this new leak gives us a nearly complete rundown of the major specs of the new processors.
The new Intel Nova Lake-S leak comes from a regular source of such information, X user, Jaykihn. In response to a question about the upcoming launch, they gave a full breakdown of the core count and cache amounts of the new chips, though they didn’t go as far as actually naming each new processor.
Specifically, Jaykihn, notes that the flagship chip of the range – which is expected to arrive with a new naming scheme above that of the company’s current Core Ultra 9 flagship CPUs – will have 16 P-Cores, 32 E-Cores, and 4 LPE-Cores (new low-power E-Cores introduced with this architecture), along with 288MB of L3 cache.
These figures compare to just eight P-Cores, 16 E-Cores, and a mere 36MB of L3 cache in its current flagship chip, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. I’ve tabulated the rest of the leaked Nova Lake-S CPU details below, alongside comparable CPUs from today’s AMD and Intel lineups.
| CPU name | Architecture | Total cores | P-Cores | E-Cores | LPE-Cores | L3 Cache |
| Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | Intel Arrow Lake | 24 | 8 | 16 | NA | 36MB |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 265K | Intel Arrow Lake | 20 | 8 | 12 | NA | 30MB |
| AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D 2 | AMD Zen 5 | 16 | NA | NA | NA | 192MB |
| AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D | AMD Zen 5 | 8 | NA | NA | NA | 96MB |
| TBD | Intel Nova Lake-S | 52 | 16 | 32 | 4 | 288MB |
| TBD | Intel Nova Lake-S | 44 | 16 | 24 | 4 | 264MB |
| Intel Core Ultra 9 XXX | Intel Nova Lake-S | 28 | 8 | 16 | 4 | 144MB |
| Intel Core Ultra 9 XXX | Intel Nova Lake-S | 28 | 8 | 16 | 4 | 144MB |
| Intel Core Ultra 9 XXX | Intel Nova Lake-S | 22 | 6 | 12 | 4 | 108MB |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 XXX | Intel Nova Lake-S | 24 | 8 | 12 | 4 | 132MB |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 XXX | Intel Nova Lake-S | 24 | 8 | 12 | 4 | 132MB |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 XXX | Intel Nova Lake-S | 22 | 6 | 12 | 4 | 108MB |
The significance of this cache is that a large pool of it in AMD’s Ryzen X3D processors has been their key to unlocking chart-topping game performance. Cache is a local store of memory held on the CPU, which it can use instead of having to pull data from the PC’s RAM. Because the cache is so close to the CPU cores and runs so much faster than RAM, any chance the CPU has to use it can reduce latency in your system.
However, cache comparisons to AMD X3D aren’t entirely fair, as AMD and Intel’s CPUs use fundamentally different architectures. The only proof of the effectiveness of Intel putting so much extra cache in these chips will be in how they actually perform.
Also, as with any leak, none of this information has been confirmed, so take it with a grain of salt. We could hear more official information about this launch at the Computex tech trade show in early June, where we could also hear more about AMD’s next-generation Zen 6 CPUs.
