Two years after the Core Ultra 200 “Arrow Lake” processors, Intel is finally close to launching new generation of CPUs for desktop computers, which are mostly used for gaming thee days. Gaming performance specifically was a weak point of Arrow Lake and that is is one of the things expected to be fixed by the upcoming Core Ultra 4000 “Nova Lake” processors. However, the improvements may not be as good as expected, according to leaks.
The Twitter-based leaker Kopite7kimi has now spoken up on the topic of Intel’s new processor generation. It should be pointed out that his strong past reputation has been earned mainly by leaking Nvidia’s future plans, while he has very limited track record in when it comes to Intel or AMD processors. This source states, however, that while the Core Ultra 4000 desktop processors bring a new core architecture as well as a new SoC tile and memory controller—and on top of that a new, significantly improved (judging by the clock speeds of Apple’s chips) manufacturing process—gaming performance is reportedly roughly the same as that of Arrow Lake processors. That is, the unsuccessful Core Ultra 200 generation, which is mostly worse in games than the previous 7nm Raptor Lake processors of the 13th and 14th Core generations (launched in 2022 and 2023) for the LGA 1700 socket. So Nova Lake may not surpass these old 7nm chips either.
Kopite7kimi writes that the gaming performance of Nova Lake and Arrow Lake is “very similar,” which does not rule out a certain small improvement. It will probably be only a few percent, however, and thus not very noticeable. But note—this applies to the regular vanilla models of Nova Lake processors. But Intel is also preparing special gaming models designated BFC in this generation, which will probably fare better. Like AMD’s Ryzen “X3D” gaming processors, they have an enlarged L3 cache, which should help in games, and with it they could deliver a decent jump in gaming performance over previous Intel generations.
The negative report from Kopite7kimi does not directly concern these BFC models; it speaks only of standard models with less cache. However, the fact that gaming performance will be improved only by the cache may be a disadvantage even for BFC SKUs. If the processors provided some improvement outside BFC’s effect as well, both gains would add up in the BFC versions.
Did Intel Fail to Take Advantage of the 2nm Process?
It’s often speculated currently that Nova Lake will display a relatively low performance increase in general because Intel failed to raise the clock speeds of the P-Cores despite using a 2nm process. That could explain the missing progress in gaming performance, because higher IPC of the microarchitecture may not translate into big gains in games (and even the newly added APX and AVX-512 instructions will not be used by games at first), particularly if the cores are again limited by relatively high memory latency, as with Arrow Lake processors. Still, these notiona are probably mostly speculative for now, and we do not know for certain whether there is any real basis behind them.
Doubts about Nova Lake clock speeds are probably based on a particular Intel document that has leaked some time ago, which attributes a single-thread performance increase of just 10% or slightly more to Nova Lake processor (the exact figure was >1.1×, so an increase of more than 10%). We wrote about it in this article:
The performance estimate leaked was quite striking at that time, because it could be expected that the P-Core could have performance per 1 MHz (so-called “IPC”) roughly 10% higher owing to being a brand new architecture, so for the “1.1×” single-thread performance prediction to hold, clock speeds could not rise at the same time, or they would even have to get worse. It is possible, however, that this figure is no longer representative and Intel is now counting on a larger increase, in which case the whole construction would fall apart.
In any case, even if the gaming performance of standard Nova Lake processors turns out to be a disappointment, the BFC models with the large cache may still shine. By the time 5800X3D launched, its Zen 3 architecture’s single-thread performance already lagged behind Intel’s 12th and 13th generation Core processors in 2021 and 2022 a lot. Yet Ryzen 7 5800X3D processors scored well in games in spite of that. If the large cache in Nova Lake offers a similar benefit, the gaming performance of BFC models could rise significantly even if the rest of the architecture turns out underwhelming.
From the gamers’ perspective, the BFC models could thus save the entire generation, similar to how Ryzen 9000 processors were initially heavily criticized (also for their low increase in gaming performance), but then the large-cache X3D version went and became the most powerful gaming processor without anything else getting close. Many gamers apparently do not care much about non-gaming performance thee days, so if BFC works well, the performance of the regular models might not matter to them. Naturally, though, it will also depend on the price Intel asks for BFC processors.
Source: Kopite7kimi
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
