Intel admits 'we kind of fumbled the football' on desktop CPUs: Nova Lake to better fight AMD

Intel has admitted it dropped the ball with desktop processors and Arrow Lake CPUs, hoping to turn things around with its next-generation Nova Lake CPUs in 2026.

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Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner spoke at the Deutsche Bank 2025 Technology Conference, talking about Intel's upcoming products including desktops and servers, with some comments on consumer CPUs.

He mentioned Intel's high-end CPU positioning and that its Arrow Lake chips had lower gaming performance than their predecessors, and that AMD had picked up aggressively in the same space with its Zen 5-based Ryzen CPUs. AMD has done a phenomenal job with its X3D processors as well, with the super-popular Ryzen 7 9800X3D being a kick-ass gaming CPU.

Intel CFO David Zinsner said: "As you know, we kind of fumbled the football on the desktop side, particularly high performance desktop side. So we're as you kind of look at share on a dollar basis versus a unit basis, we don't perform as well and it's mostly because of this high end desktop business that we didn't have a good offering this year. But Nova Lake, which is the next product, is a more complete set of SKUs".

He continued: "It does address the high end desktop market. And so we would expect that we will improve our position next year. So all in all, I actually feel pretty good about the client. It's not executing flawlessly, but it's executing pretty well".

On the server side of things, David talked about Intel's strategy when it comes to Xeon, where he was asked about Diamond Rapids and when it would get closer to EPYC from AMD. He said that Diamond Rapids will add Multi-Threading support, after it was expected to sport a non-SMT design.

Zinsner also mentioned that it will be Coral Rapids that will be Intel's "real opportunity" to fight back against AMD's EPYC family of processors. He continued: "Doesn't get us quite there [Diamond Rapids]. I mean, does in certain cases, the performance is actually better. But in other cases, it's not. And so we've got more work to do to finally get to a place and it's really not I think Lip Bu actually named the product in some forum, but Coral Rapids is the next product. And that's our real opportunity, I think, to begin to take a really good step forward".

He added: "I would say as Lip Bu has come in, he has really rolled up his sleeves and torn apart that strategy and looked at the roadmap and there were pockets there were gaps quite honestly in that roadmap that we were allowing that Lip Bu is not going to allow and so particularly around multi threading. And so we will be adjusting the roadmap to make sure that we are listening to customers and delivering products that customers want and need".

"So Nova Lake in the client side, great opportunity for us. As we progress from Diamond Rapids to Coral Rapids and so forth, great opportunity for us to command better pricing as we deliver more per watt to our customers".