Late last month, kopite7kimi imagined a short list of upcoming unlocked "Nova Lake-S" desktop processor SKUs. At the time, speculation pointed to Intel readying products that will (eventually) compete with AMD's popular and highly-praised 3D V-Cache-augmented gaming products. Recent leaks have suggested that only next-gen "Core Ultra 400K-series" variants will be blessed with large pools of Big Last Level Cache (bLLC), potentially going up to 288 MB for beefier dual-compute tile configurations.

A theorized sub-flagship model was said to feature a 2x 8+12 (40 Cores + 4 LPE Cores) setup, but another soothsayer has weighed in with a slightly adjusted spec outlay. Yesterday, Haze (aka Haze2K1) largely corroborated previously leaked information, but listed a low number of performance cores when describing the second-best unlocked "Nova Lake-S" chip—bringing its total down to 42 (consisting of P, E, & LPE units). In revised form, each tile apparently contains seven performance-oriented units, instead of eight. Apparently, only the truly flagship-level design will be bestowed with twin 8+16 compute tiles—granting a grand total core count of 52.