Intel's upcoming "Nova Lake-S" introduces a completely new microarchitecture and under-the-hood enhancements. However, the appearance of the latest shipping manifests indicates that Intel is ensuring its partners receive early samples to make necessary software/firmware optimizations. And now, it appears that the 52-core top SKU will ship with speeds that may exceed 5.0 GHz. An early engineering sample confirms the appearance of test hardware in partner shipments, which means that Intel is already moving validation pieces to OEMs and cooling vendors so they can start tuning systems well ahead of qualification samples and mass production. The 52-core part is a tiled design that pairs two compute tiles with a single SoC tile. Each compute tile houses eight P-Cores based on Coyote Cove and 16 efficient E-Cores based on Arctic Wolf, while the SoC tile contributes four low-power Arctic Wolf LPE-cores. That gives Nova Lake-S a 16 P-Core, 32 E-Core, and 4 LPE-Core configuration totaling 52 cores for the top SKU, with single-tile variants offering a 28-core option.

Intel will also offer big-cache bLLC variants aimed at workloads that benefit from larger on-die caches. On the platform side, Nova Lake-S will use the LGA-1954 socket with a 45x37.5 mm footprint, which matches LGA-1851 sizing and should preserve broad cooler compatibility even if some vendors need offset plates or other tweaks for optimal contact. The P-cores will ship without SMT, following the same choice made for Arrow Lake, while Intel's cache-first bLLC approach looks intended to counter AMD's stacked 3D V-Cache strategy. For now, the 4.8 GHz reading comes from an engineering sample and Pre-QS shipments; expect clock speeds to be refined upward as QS samples roll out and Intel moves closer to a formal launch. Given Intel's ambition to re-capture a significant part of the desktop market share, we can expect to see boost clock speeds north of 5.0 GHz.