The battle in the high-performance APU segment could soon get a new contender, as the latest rumours suggest Intel is preparing a monster SoC to challenge AMD and Apple in the space. According to a new report, a new variant of the next-generation Nova Lake architecture, dubbed “Nova Lake-AX”, is on the table, and its rumoured specifications are nothing short of spectacular.

First mentioned by Jaykhin, and then corroborated and expanded Raichu, this “AX” variant reportedly takes a different approach from the dual-tile design of the upcoming Nova Lake-S desktop chips. To make room for the iGPU, Intel is said to have removed one of the CPU tiles, leaving a single compute tile with eight “Coyote Cove” P-Cores and sixteen “Arctic Wolf” E-Cores. Combined with the four-core low-power island on the SoC, this gives the APU a total of 28 CPU cores.

It is claimed that the iGPU is powered by the upcoming Xe3 “Celestial” architecture and packs 384 EUs. Assuming a similar structure to previous Intel GPUs, this would translate to a whopping 48 Xe-Cores. To put that into perspective, that's more graphics cores than some of Intel's current Arc discrete desktop graphics cards. To feed this iGPU, Intel is reportedly pairing the chip with a wide 256-bit memory bus. As for the memory subsystem, these APUs would support LPDDR5X memory, with potential speeds of up to 10,667MT/s.

Despite these incredible specifications, it is also reported that the future of this project is ‘questionable'. If accurate, then Intel could be evaluating market viability before moving ahead with further development.

KitGuru says: Do you think Intel should advance with the Nova Lake-AX APUs?

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