Intel has highlighted that Nova Lake will address the high-end desktop CPU market better than its Arrow Lake CPUs in 2026.
Intel Nova Lake Desktop CPUs To Bring Back Strong Competition In The High-End Desktop CPU Segment, While Diamond Rapids & Coral Rapids With SMT To Accelerate Xeon
Intel's CFO, David Zinsner, made a few comments about Intel's upcoming product segments, including desktop and servers, at the Deutsche Bank 2025 Technology Conference. David particularly mentioned their high-end desktop positioning, which hasn't been great this year with the Arrow Lake launch. The CPUs not only delivered lower gaming performance than their predecessors, but AMD managed to pick up aggressively in the same space with its strong Ryzen 9000 "AM5" portfolio, especially the 3D V-Cache parts.
With that said, Intel has at least acknowledged that Arrow Lake wasn't great, so they are going to make a big comeback with Nova Lake, which is the next-generation family that will cover both desktop & laptop segments. Intel's CEO has already stated that Nova Lake will bridge the gap with AMD's Ryzen CPUs in 2026, so it will be Nova Lake Desktop against Zen 6 desktop.
As you know, we kind of fumbled the football on the desktop side, particularly high performance desktop side. So we’re as you kind of look at share on a dollar basis versus a unit basis, we don’t perform as well and it’s mostly because of this high end desktop business that we didn’t have a good offering this year. But Nova Lake, which is the next product, is a more complete set of SKUs.
It does address the high end desktop market. And so we would expect that we will improve our position next year. So all in all, I actually feel pretty good about the client. It’s not executing flawlessly, but it’s executing pretty well.
David Zinsner - Intel CFO (Deutsche Bank 2025 Technology Conference)
In addition to the client side, David also shed some light on the Xeon server strategy. When asked about whether Diamond Rapids gets them closer to AMD's EPYC family, he replied that while the performance is better, the overall chip doesn't get them quite where they want it to be. Diamond Rapids is already underway so it will feature a Non-SMT design, which was chosen under the leadership of ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger.
Those non-SMT roadmaps and plans have now been axed in favor of SMT support. He also stated that it is Coral Rapids that will be Intel's "real opportunity" to land a massive comeback against AMD's EPYC line.
Doesn’t get us quite there [Diamond Rapids]. I mean, does in certain cases, the performance is actually better. But in other cases, it’s not. And so we’ve got more work to do to finally get to a place and it’s really not I think Lip Bu actually named the product in some forum, but Coral Rapids is the next product. And that’s our real opportunity, I think, to begin to take a really good step forward.
I would say as Lip Bu has come in, he has really rolled up his sleeves and torn apart that strategy and looked at the roadmap and there were pockets there were gaps quite honestly in that roadmap that we were allowing that Lip Bu is not going to allow and so particularly around multi threading. And so we will be adjusting the roadmap to make sure that we are listening to customers and delivering products that customers want and need.
So Nova Lake in the client side, great opportunity for us. As we progress from Diamond Rapids to Coral Rapids and so forth, great opportunity for us to command better pricing as we deliver more per watt to our customers.
David Zinsner - Intel CFO (Deutsche Bank 2025 Technology Conference)
During this and next year, Intel will launch at least two brand new client-side families, Panther Lake & Nova Lake, while the server family will see the addition of Clearwater Forest "Xeon 7E" and Diamond Rapids "Xeon 7P" families. Coral Rapids mostly looks like a 2027-2028 product, so it is still a while before we get to see that chip in action. Diamond Rapids, Clearwater Forest, and Panther Lake will leverage Intel's 18A process node, while Nova Lake will utilize a mix of technologies for its tiles (TSMC + Intel).
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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