Nova Lake leak suggests Intel is changing Core Ultra names yet again

Intel's upcoming Nova Lake desktop lineup has surfaced in another leak via @laurentschoice on X, this time with what appears to be the Core Ultra 9 4950K. While the actual screenshot doesn't show much in the way of, well, anything, it tells us Intel is planning to switch up its CPU names again by bringing back four-digit CPU identifiers, just one generation (two if you count refreshed Arrow Lake) after it moved from five-digit IDs (14900K) to three-digit ones (285K).

The screenshot purportedly showing the processor lists the chip alongside Intel's 18A process, while accompanying information points to a 28-core configuration and some early benchmark scores that don't mean much at the time of writing. The Core Ultra 9 4950K was reportedly running on Intel's upcoming Z990 desktop platform and is said to score close to 1,000 points and 20,000 points in what looks to be CPU-Z's single and multi-threaded tests, respectively. However, without information about clock speeds, power limits or the exact state of the silicon, the results cannot yet be meaningfully compared against existing processors.

The mention of Intel 18A is also noteworthy. Earlier Nova Lake leaks predominantly pointed to TSMC's N2 process for the CPU tile, but more recent reports suggest Intel has shifted a much larger share of Nova Lake production to its own 18A node, which is already being used for Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest. Some rumours have even suggested that non-bLLC desktop SKUs could use 18A while higher-end cache-heavy variants remain on TSMC silicon.

Nevertheless, the leak adds another data point to the growing picture surrounding Nova Lake-S. The claimed 8P + 20E configuration broadly matches an earlier leak describing a 28-core Core Ultra 9 with 8 P-cores, 16 E-cores and 4 LP-E cores, suggesting the new leak may simply be grouping the two classes of efficiency cores together. If an earlier leak is accurate, the Core Ultra 9 4950K has a nominal TDP of 65 Watts and, more importantly, will not be one of the SKUs to be equipped with bLLC.