The Intel Nova Lake leaks are coming thick and quick in the present day. Earlier, Nick reported on the apparently outsized energy necessities of the dual-CPU-die variant of Nova Lake with 52 cores. Now come claimed particulars concerning the equally outsized proportions of the extensively rumoured “bLLC” model of the Nova Lake CPU die with added cache reminiscence.
On this context, “bLLC” stands for ‘huge final stage cache’ and signifies Intel’s response to AMD’s X3D V-cache CPUs, such because the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The distinction with Intel’s method is that as a substitute of including a separate slice of cache reminiscence to the CPU die, as AMD does, Intel is reportedly planning to construct the additional cache reminiscence into the die itself.
NVL 8+16 Die TSMC N2 ~110+mm2NVL 8+16 bLLC Die TSMC N2 ~150+mm2 https://t.co/beHNikpl1OFebruary 11, 2026
If true, that may imply the bLLC CPU die might be considerably larger than the non-bLLC die. And in the present day, we have now some apparently leaked numbers to placed on that measurement differential.
Making comparisons with AMD is complicated, though. The Nova Lake dies contain eight Performance and 16 Efficient cores, while the AMD die has just eight standard Zen 5 cores.
Meanwhile, the Nova Lake die is claimed to be built on TSMC’s N2 silicon node, while Zen 5 is on TSMC N4, which is fully two generations of silicon older. If you’re wondering why there’s only talk of TSMC silicon, my understanding is that Intel may be farming out production of the larger CPU variants of Nova Lake to TSMC, while producing the smaller ones in-house on its new 18A node.
There is precedent for this approach in Intel’s new Panther Lake CPUs. They use the Intel 3 node for the smaller version of the Xe3 iGPU, but TSMC N3 for the large iGPU. Anywho, the transistor density of TSMC’s N2 node is dramatically higher than its N4 node.
Current rumours suggest that the big Nova Lake CPU die will contain 144 MB of bLLC cache. The AMD Ryzen 9800X3D currently has 64 MB of L3 memory in the V-cache slice, plus another 32 MB on-die. Of course, AMD will likely have its own upgraded Zen 6-based CPUs with even more V-cache around the time that Nova Lake is made available.
Anywho, Nova Lake is supposedly due out later this year, though for now it’s not clear whether these purported bLLC models will be available from day one. On paper, they should be the most compelling Nova Lake models from a gaming perspective, as implied by the outstanding gaming performance of AMD’s X3D chips.
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