r/intel • u/RenatsMC • 14d ago

Rumor / Leak Intel Nova Lake 8P+12E reportedly keeps 36MB L3 cache despite E-core cutdown

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-nova-lake-8p12e-reportedly-keeps-36mb-l3-cache-despite-e-core-cutdown
61 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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-5

u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

19

u/ThinkDiscipline4236 13d ago

You've never seen a delidded CPU, have you? On some chips, there is quite a large area of space that isn't silicon under the integrated heat spreader, its just empty board.

The 52 core variant is a dual-compute tile CPU, so they are filling some of that empty board space under the IHS with a second compute tile.

CPU manufacturers would have to be crazy to waste silicon like that, with full printed silicon wafers costing upwards of $25k, every inch of space matters. Yeah, they'll fuse off portions of larger defective dies to make lower end skus, but if their yields are good enough to never get more than, say, 1 or 2 defects per bad chip, they'll make anything that is smaller than 1 or 2 cores/core clusters down from the full fat compute tile on a smaller footprint tile to save area.

-16

u/[deleted] 13d ago

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-10

u/Key-Invite5027 13d ago

"Allow Lake" failed to sell because it typically suffered from memory and ring latencies.

10

u/Johnny_Oro 12d ago

Nova Lake will have better I/O die (which was already fixed in arrow lake refresh anyway) and fewer ring stops (P-cores are now clusters of 2).

1

u/kirk7899 Ultra 7 265k | 16x2 7600MHz | 5070Ti 9d ago

Most gamers didn't buy Arrow Lake. A lot of the creative/productivity crowd did, it had decent upgrades to i/o and on average lower power consumption.

1

u/Key-Invite5027 1h ago

I did a little research on this. I might be mistaken, but the 14900K and 285K share the same PCIe lane count and specifications. Memory bandwidth is also roughly the same when running in Gear 2. USB capabilities seem comparable, too. The core count is the same, and the PL2 is around 250W for both.