Discussion Intel Nova Lake in H2-2026: Discussion Threads

[511]

The leak is based on same memory speed there is only uArch improvement no Memory Speed improvements.

 

[mikk]

It requires a big uArch improvement without faster memory, same GPU cache size and same amount of shader units. With Razor Lake they could add more Xe3p units if it has LPDDR6 support.

 

[DavidC1]

Pantherlake has essentially minimal memory increases too. 13% is nothing. It will probably be 5% in average. But Xe3 makes caches and memory bandwidth efficient.

N2 is even worse. They could have got something like 16 Xe cores and got another big gain. I would hope the 12 Xe core version is 50% faster then.

@regen1 It's only good in a vacuum. The competitor is RDNA5. Canis shows that RDNA5 is a substantial improvement that'll likely make Xe3P irrelevant, hence my claim it'll be like PTL vs Strix but flipped with AMD having 50%+ advantage.

Both Intel and AMD could be winners if they can take the market from at least the low to mid dGPUs and actually be able to gain full revenue from nVidia.

This is only true if they can charge much as Nvidia would have. I don't think people will like that very much. 5 series laptops are going to be $1500 at the rate we're going.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

We have Canis coming 2 years later with "15W being similar to 30W"

I think people are taking @Kepler_L2 's comment a bit too literally.

Canis is a 15W TDP with a gaming performance that probably matches Panther Lake when its TDP is set to 30W.

This does not mean that Canis at 15W performs 2x faster than Panther Lake if the latter is also set to 15W. We don't know if PTL-H gains any substantial amount of gaming performance above 22W. Strix Point's gains above 22W in gaming are almost negligible, for example..


It could be that Canis' gaming performance is only ~50% faster than PTL-H when both are set to 15W. And on Canis' side that comes with a bunch of caveats that would make it inadequate to compete against PTL-H in every other PC use case: lower single-threaded CPU performance due to dense cores at lower clocks, much lower thread count that would hurt multitasking PC use, not enough PHYs and I/O for a bunch of TB4/USB4 ports, fewer display outputs, lack of dedicated high performance video codecs for 4K60 streaming, etc.

15W Canis (full focus on gaming) being similar to 30W PTL-H (general purpose chip) doesn't mean Intel couldn't design a gaming-focused monolithic N3P/18A chip with e.g. 192bit L5X, 16 Xe3, 4P + 4E cores, no NPU, etc. that would perform a lot closer to Canis at 15W in gaming FPS / frametimes.

 

[mikk]

PTL Xe3 came with 50% more units and a doubled GPU cache. Even with a larger uarch improvment on Xe3p it is not getting the same performance improvement.

ToTTenTranz, PTL 12Xe3 will gain a lot from 22W to 45W or 65W. Even Lunar Lake with much lower max iGPU clock speeds is gaining quite a bit with 30 or 37W. I think the CPU cores are too power hungry for iGPU gaming. In the early CES PTL previews on a ~60W device the budget sharing was roughly 50% for both CPU and iGPU. Maybe Intel could improve the power management over time.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

ToTTenTranz, PTL 12Xe3 will gain a lot from 22W to 45W or 65W.

I really doubt this, especially within the 45-65W range (unlike Halo). At some point the gains are bottlenecked by RAM bandwidth, so the iGPU and CPU get high clocks and consume a lot of power but they're mostly stalling for the data to come. It doesn't have a 256bit bus nor 32MB IC like Halo.

Regardless, ThePhawx seems to have some unit in his hands and he's been making a battery of tests on Panther Lake H. We should be getting news about this within the next few days.