Intel Arrow Lake Refresh and Nova Lake, the leaks already look to 2026

There are still two months left until the launch of Intel Meteor Lakebut the rumors already speak of future generations of processors. In the last few hours, Moore Law Is Dead has shared the first details regarding Arrow Lake Refresh and Nova Lake, which will debut between 2025 and 2026.

Arrow Lake Refresh would be scheduled for now second half of 2025 and, as the name suggests, it won’t be too different from the previous Arrow Lake range, although there will be no shortage of new features. According to the information in possession of Moore Law Is Dead these processors will have the double the E-Core, reaching up to 32, and will use the LGA1851 socket. The architectures they would remain Lion Cove for P-Core and Skymont for E-Core and LPE-Core, while the chip would be produced with i Intel 20A and TSMC N3B nodes.

Arrow Lake Refresh should clash with AMD Ryzen 8000 or 9000 chips, based on Zen6 architecture. Virtually nothing is known yet about the design of the Ryzen processors, however according to rumors they will adopt a hybrid architecture and will have more than 24 cores.

Nova Lake will instead arrive in the second half of 2026, after Panther Lake, and the count of P-Core and LPE-Core will increase, this time leaving the E-Core count intact; this will lead to having configurations up to 16 P-Core, 32 E-Core and 4 LPE-Core. According to the leaker, the chips will be produced with the TSMC N2B and Intel 18A, or Intel 14A processes (it is not yet clear what the company will call the node following 18A), while it is not yet clear which architectures will be used: E-Core and LPE-Core should be based on Arctic Wolf, while P-Core would rely on Rentable Unit, but Moore Law Is Dead has several doubts on this matter and suggests not to take this information as definitive.

Cover image: alexgrec