Intel's new Nova Lake-AX chips on the way, to compete with AMD's powerful Strix Halo APUs

Intel has nothing to compete against AMD's powerful new Strix Halo APUs, but the company is reportedly cooking up its new enthusiast-class SoC dubbed Nova Lake-AX.

In a new post on X from leaker @Jaykihn, we're hearing that the preliminary name of Intel's new enthusiast-class processor is Nova Lake-AX, after rumors in 2024 that the company was working on an Arrow Lake Halo CPU which was later canceled. However, the plans continued, and now we can reportedly expect a Nova Lake-AX chip that would compete with Strix Halo.

The insider said nothing but "Nova Lake-AX" that would launch in 2026 with a full top-to-bottom stack, unlike Panther Lake, which is aimed at the laptop and mobile markets. Intel's upcoming Nova Lake CPU family will be similar to Arrow Lake, where we'll see the new chips launch in mobile and desktop form, without restrictions to a particular segment.

Intel's purported Nova Lake-AX would include an enthusiast-class offering, where we can probably expect these new chips to launch inside of new 2026 laptops (and maybe even handhelds, just like AMD's new Strix Halo APUs). As for what to expect inside of Nova Lake-AX, we could expect the use of its in-house Foveros packaging technology, as well as X3D-style cache thrown into the mix.

The company's upcoming Nova Lake-S and Nova Lake-HX processors will reportedly feature up to 52 cores using a combination of 16 P-Cores based on the Cougar Cove architecture, and 32 E-Cores based on the Arctic Wolf architecture, joined by 4 LP-E cores.

Nova Lake-S and Nova Lake-HX processors will reportedly feature two compute tiles, each with 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, while the 4 LP-E cores will be found on their own low-power island. Nova Lake-AX should be very similar, but we could expect to see additional cache on its own tile, something that is paramount for the powerful integrated GPU.

Intel's new Nova Lake-AX enthusiast-class processor is expected to feature a chunky integrated GPU based on the Xe3 "Celestial" GPU architecture, packing up to or more than 12 Xe3 cores. AMD used its upgraded RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture on its Strix Halo APUs, offering some fantastic gaming performance for the processors, so we should expect the enthusiast-class Nova Lake-AX processor to feature competitive GPU performance to Strix Halo.

CES 2026 kicks off in January 2026, where we could expect a tease -- and maybe even an announcement -- of Intel's upcoming Nova Lake-AX enthusiast-class processors. AMD will have beefed-up APUs by then, which should be based on the next-gen Zen 6 CPU architecture, as well as an upgraded RDNA 4 or even UDNA-based GPU architecture.