Intel's next-gen Nova Lake-HX laptop CPUs spotted, with a much larger BGA 2540 socket

Intel's next-generation Nova Lake-HX high-performance laptop processors have been teased in new shipping manifests, along with the new BGA 2540 socket they will be using.

In a new post on X by user @x86deadandback, who spotted a new NBD shipping manifest that included test tools for the "BGA2540-NVL-HX" which points to a new BGA 2540 socket, and the new Nova Lake-HX processors.

Intel uses the "HX" moniker for its high-performance mobile series processors, which leads us to believe Nova Lake-HX will be the successor to Arrow Lake-HX.

Intel's next-gen Nova Lake-HX mobile processors will also feature a much bigger package than Arrow Lake-HX which uses the BGA 2114 socket, with Nova Lake-HX expected to roll out with the new BGA 2540 socket making it around 20% bigger. It's an even bigger socket than BGA 1964 which was used for Raptor Lake-HX, too. The new BGA 2540 socket is also expected to be the same socket used for Intel's new Panther Lake mobile CPUs.

The desktop Nova Lake-S family of processors will be using a new LGA 1954 socket, so the Nova Lake-HX mobile package is much bigger than the desktop socket, too.

We should expect a similar core and thread count on Nova Lake-HX laptop CPUs to the Nova Lake-S desktop CPUs, with the latest rumors pointing to up to 52 cores (with 14 P-Cores) on Nova Lake-S. We could see Intel rolling out Nova Lake-HX laptop processors with up to 16 P-Cores and 32 E-Cores, which will be a huge upgrade over the 24 cores found in the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" CPUs on the market.

Nova Lake will also be introducing up to 36 PCIe 5.0 lanes on the desktop, so we should also expect something similar (but not quite as many lanes) on the mobile-focused Nova Lake-HX processors.