Intel's upcoming Nova Lake-S & Arrow Lake-S Refresh Desktop CPUs have been spotted within shipping manifestos at NBD.
Intel Nova Lake-S "LGA 1954" & Arrow Lake-S Refresh "LGA 1851" Are The Next Desktop CPUs To Look Forward To
Intel's Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPU lineup has already been launched, and turned out to be a big miss in terms of gaming performance. The company has put out various optimizations and updates, mainly to accelerate the chips through faster/tighter memory support, and tuning the fabric speed, but AMD's Zen 5 lineup has just decimated them in all regards, and has been outselling Intel's latest CPUs by record numbers, leading to record share and revenue growth.
But Intel isn't done with the desktop platform yet. They are planning a return, and although the nearest desktop launch, Arrow Lake-S Refresh, might not be the one most are looking forward to, it's going to offer somewhat better performance through improved clock speeds and a mature process technology. Intel's Arrow Lake-S Refresh CPU family was originally going to feature an upgraded NPU; however, those plans have been dropped, and we are only going to see clock speed bumps on the LGA 1851 socket.
Intel's LGA 1851 socket will only last the Arrow Lake-S and Arrow Lake-S Refresh generation, as the next big desktop launch is going to be Nova Lake. Featuring Coyote Cove P-Cores and Arctic Wolf E-Cores, the lineup is going to take things to the next level with up to 52 cores in dual compute tile and 28 cores in single compute tile flavors.
NBD confirms a 28-core variant of the Nova Lake-S Desktop CPU, which should adopt an 8 P-Core, 16 E-Core, and 4 LP-E core configuration. The CPU will also feature at least 4 Xe3 iGPU cores. No details on the clock speed, TDPs, or process technologies are mentioned, but the chiplet-like tile design will be adopted by Nova Lake-S, too.
The same 28-core CPU dies will also be used by Nova Lake-HX for the enthusiast mobile CPU family, though the dual-compute tile variant isn't expected to land on mobile according to recent rumors.
Also, what is interesting is that Intel's Nova Lake-S Desktop CPUs are already listed in the Pre-Qualification Sample stage, which means that these chips are already past the engineering stage. That sounds really good. Intel has already shown Panther Lake with 18A, and they also showed Clearwater Forest with up to 288 E-Cores, also on 18A, but Nova Lake-S is reportedly going to be outsourced to TSMC. So things seem to be going smoothly for Intel as far as 18A is concerned.
Intel Nova Lake-S Desktop CPUs will be launching around mid to the second half of 2026, and respective motherboards are expected to be teased ahead of the launch at next year's Computex, so stay tuned for more information. Intel has also stated that Nova Lake-S will close the gap with AMD when it launches in late 2026.
Nova Lake-S vs Arrow Lake-S
| Family | Nova Lake-S | Arrow Lake-S |
|---|---|---|
| Core Count (Max) | 52 | 24 |
| Thread Count (Max) | 52 | 24 |
| Max P-Cores | 16 | 8 |
| Max E-Cores | 32 | 16 |
| Max LP-E Cores | 4 | 0 |
| Max Cache (L2+L3) | 160-320 MB | 76 MB |
| Max bLLC Cache | 144-288 MB | N/A |
| DDR5 (1DPC 1R) | 8000 MT/s | 7200-6400 MT/s |
| PCIe 5.0 Lanes (Max) | 36 | 24 |
| PCIe 4.0 Lanes (Max) | 16 | 4 |
| Socket Support | LGA 1954 | LGA 1851 |
| Max TDP (PL1) | 125-175W | 125W |
| Max Power | ~700W (Dual) ~350W (Single) | ~400W |
| Launch | 2H 2026 | 1H 2026 |
News Source: @x86deadandback
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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