Intel rumoured to be working on a Nova Lake-based CPU with a mega iGPU to take on AMD's Strix Halo

AMD's Strix Halo APU with its outsized integrated graphics is of debatable benefit for PC gaming (more on that in a moment). But apparently Intel still wants to take on AMD in the uber-powerful APU market with a variant of its upcoming Nova Lake generation of chips.

So say rumours emerging today. It started with a relatively unassuming X post referring to "Nova Lake-AX" and describing it as "preliminary". WCCFTech has since fleshed that out, claiming that Nova Lake-HX chips will be, "halo-class enthusiast CPUs, which would compete with AMD and Apple SoCs such as the Strix Halo and M4 lineup."

As for specs, it's said Nova Lake-AX will pack two CPU tiles, each with eight P cores and 16 E cores, plus four ultra-low power LP-E cores located on a separate "low power" island and thus a grand total of 52 CPU cores. Of course, the really interesting bit would be the iGPU.

That's claimed to be based on Intel's next-gen Celestial graphics architecture, otherwise known as XE3. Intel's current most powerful iGPU is in Lunar Lake (pictured above). It uses XE2 or Battlemage technology and sports eight execution units or EUs.

WCCF speculates that the GPU tile in Nova Lake-AX could include as many as 20 to 24 XE3-spec EUs, which would be a huge upgrade. For context, AMD's Strix Halo APU has 40 CUs or compute units. They're not directly comparable to an Intel EU. However, AMD's mainstream APU, Strix Point, tops out at 16 CUs.

In other words, Strix Halo has well over double the CU count of Strix Point. And if you apply similar scaling to Intel's current top iGPU, you get to 20-plus EUs. Again, nothing is confirmed, but it all superficially scans.

Of course, as I alluded to up front, this Nova Lake-AX chip may not necessarily shape up as a great gaming solution. AMD's Strix Halo, while very powerful for an APU, isn't ideal for gaming.

Primarily, that's because it's very expensive for an APU. AMD has given Strix Halo 16 CPU cores. If what you wanted was an affordable APU alternative to, say, Nvidia's discrete mobile GPUs for laptops, you wouldn't make the CPU very expensive with flagship specs. An eight-core CPU would be plenty. After all, our favourite desktop CPU, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, only has eight cores.

Instead, Strix Halo is much more interesting as a chip for creatives and people wanting to run small AI models locally on a laptop. And that is probably what this Nova Lake-AX APU will also be best at, rather than gaming. At least from a bang-per-buck perspective, you'll still likely be better off with a discrete GPU.