Intel Nova Lake leaks suggest 28-core CPUs and TSMC 2nm manufacturing

Recent leaks and industry reports suggest significant shifts in Intel’s upcoming processor roadmap. A rumored high-end desktop processor, the Core Ultra 9 4950K from the Nova Lake-S family, has appeared in CPU-Z benchmarks. This chip is expected to feature 28 cores—reportedly 8 performance cores and 20 efficiency cores—and may signal a return to four-digit model numbering. Early benchmark results suggest a single-thread score near 1,000 and a multi-thread score near 20,000.

Manufacturing strategies for these next-generation chips are also emerging. Intel is expected to utilize a hybrid manufacturing approach, combining its own Intel 18A process with TSMC’s 2nm family (N2P and N2X) for Nova Lake and Razor Lake architectures. This move is interpreted by analysts as a way to secure advanced capacity and compete with AMD.

Furthermore, Intel’s mobile roadmap, specifically the Razor Lake series, may introduce Big Last Level Cache (bLLC) technology to laptops. This technology, similar to AMD’s 3D V-Cache, stacks L3 cache vertically to reduce latency and improve gaming performance. In the semiconductor materials sector, Henkel has introduced a new generation of conductive chip attach film (cDAF) with a thermal conductivity exceeding 8 W/m-K to address the increasing heat challenges in AI and high-performance computing (HPC) chips.