Intel's next-gen desktop family, Nova Lake, is expected to take a generational leap in terms of performance, and a big part of that is the rumored introduction of bLLC (Big Last Level Cache). It would be the company's answer to AMD's X3D chips, but implemented even more aggressively, from what we can tell so far. Now, a new leak from Jaykihn says Intel has added two new Core Ultra 5 SKUs with bLLC to the lineup, both featuring 22 cores in total.

The leaker accidentally tweeted out the wrong specs at first, so we've only embedded their correction post. According to the leak, each chip features a 22-core config comprising 6 P-Cores, 12 E-Cores, and 4 LP-E cores on a single tile. That would access to up to 144MB of bLLC. The rumor indicates one unlocked SKU with a 125W TDP and a locked SKU with a 65W TDP; there are seemingly no other differences between the two.

Dual-tile variants of Nova Lake-S could push the cache count up to 288MB, but those will likely be reserved for truly high-end SKUs. The Blue Team still offering a competitive midrange option with a lot of cache to help with gaming performance would be a welcome development. As a reminder, Nova Lake will likely use the Coyote Cove architecture for its P-cores and the Arctic Wolf architecture for its E-cores, according to leaks and rumors.

Previously, we covered how the alleged 42-core Nova Lake-S silicon could actually have 44 cores, combining 2x 8P+12E tiles, perhaps freeing up 6P+12E tiles that could be used for cheaper bLLC-equipped chips. At the time, we predicted that a Core Ultra 7 SKU with 22 cores could be the recipient of this silicon, but now this leak points toward it being used for Core Ultra 5 SKUs instead. Of course, the prospect of bLLC being limited to unlocked K-series models seems to have withered away at this point.

Nova Lake-S is shaping up to be a vast and expansive family for Intel with several SKUs that might not even make it to market by the time it launches as the Core Ultra 400 series next year. It remains to be seen how the company will name all these different models. So far, rumors indicate a CES 2027 announcement is imminent for Intel's next-gen family, but the ongoing component crisis could throw things off.

Intel on Friday confirmed that it had increased prices of some of its consumer and server CPUs, citing market dynamics, rising costs, and soaring demand for these products. While select enthusiast processors increased from $30 to $50, data center-grade products increased by hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Intel is among many suppliers that have recently hiked prices of their products, citing increasing costs and demand that exceeds their supply.

"The recent pricing updates reflect current market dynamics, including rising supply chain costs and strong demand for our Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus processors," an Intel spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "These updates are in line with recent price increases for other Intel product families based on similar factors."

This week it turned out that Intel had quietly increased recommended customer prices (RCPs) of its latest Core Ultra 200-series Plus processors for desktops — the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Core Ultra 7 250K Plus — by $30 - $50, depending on the model. Both processors belong to the Arrow Lake family and, like the rest of them, are produced by TSMC. Yet, Intel's original 'non-Plus' Core Ultra 200-series processors did not increase their MSRP. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K still carries a $599 RCP, just like it did at its launch in Q2 2024. Something similar applies to the least advanced Arrow Lake processor for desktops — the Core Ultra 5 225 — that has an RCP between $183 and $236, which is a bit lower than its launch RCP of $241.

If Intel did see supply-chain inflation, it would be reasonable to expect the company to adjust prices of the whole family. Instead, the company raised prices only on select products that apparently had become unexpectedly attractive to customers who can afford them and who have probably demonstrated willingness to buy them above recommended prices. This means that we are not dealing with a simple cost pass-through, but rather with a price hike associated with strong demand for specific SKUs.

When it comes to data center-oriented processors, we see rather massive price hikes. While higher-end Xeon 6 'Granite Rapids' CPUs cost less than they used to at launch in 2024, they are noticeably more expensive after Intel slashed their recommended prices in 2025, and they can be twofold higher when compared to retail prices from mid-2025. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that select Xeon 8000-series 'Emerald Rapids' processors now carry higher RCPs than they used to when they were released in late 2023.

All Intel Xeon processors are produced internally (so Intel cannot blame higher costs on TSMC), and while Intel gets raw materials from its partners, it is doubtful that overpriced photoresist can significantly affect RCPs of CPUs that sell for thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, Intel has been saying for several quarters now that demand for its Xeon processors exceeds supply. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for Intel to finally capitalize on that and increase RCPs of popular models.

There is a caveat, though. Actual prices of data center hardware tend to differ from list prices as they depend on many factors, including volumes and strategic relations between suppliers and consumers. To that end, while it is evident that Intel has increased RCPs of its Xeon CPUs, it remains to be seen how this affects its average selling prices (ASPs) for the ongoing quarter and for the whole year.

Intel released its new Core Ultra 200S Plus desktop processors back in March 2026, and it appears that the company has quietly increased their prices. According to Intel's official product page, the Core Ultra 270K Plus now has a recommended customer price of $339–$349, up from the previous $289–$299. Similarly, the Core Ultra 250K Plus has increased from $189–$199 to $219–$229.

While the increase amounts to an additional $30–$50 (depending on the model), it is worth noting that these higher prices have already been reflected on Amazon. We have reached out to Intel to confirm the pricing changes and will update this article if and when the company responds.

The Core Ultra 270K Plus and the 250K Plus are part of Intel’s Arrow Lake Refresh lineup and were introduced with a relatively low price compared to their non-Plus predecessors. Intel claimed up to 15% improvement in gaming performance at 1080p compared to stock Arrow Lake chips thanks to several key improvements aimed at addressing the architectural bottlenecks of the original Arrow Lake processors.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus comes with 24 cores, including 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores, which is similar to the more expensive Core Ultra 9 285K. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus comes with 18 cores across 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores, which is slightly below the 20 cores available on the Core Ultra 7 265K. Intel also increased the die-to-die interconnect frequency by 900 MHz to reduce latency and improve gaming performance.

The new chips also offer native support for faster DDR5-7200 memory, as opposed to 6400 MT/s on the non-Plus Arrow Lake chips. Then there’s Intel's new Binary Optimization Tool, a free software utility that analyzes executables and automatically recompiles them with CPU-specific optimizations. According to Intel, this alone is responsible for a significant portion of the gaming performance gains.

While the increase in price may hamper the value advantage that these chips initially offered, there is no doubt that they bring meaningful performance to the table. In our testing, we found the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to deliver excellent productivity performance with a noticeable uplift in gaming over the original Arrow Lake chips. In fact, it is currently the best Intel CPU on the market. As for the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, it offers one of the strongest value propositions at its price point. It also remains our top pick for the best budget CPU, thanks to its ability to compete with similarly priced gaming processors while excelling in heavily threaded workloads.

AMD has submitted Linux kernel patches including support for its new low-power CPU cores that will likely emerge in its future heterogeneous processors. The new patch clearly distinguishes between high-performance cores, efficiency cores, and low-power cores, so it is safe to say that AMD's upcoming CPU platforms will use three types of cores, with the low-power one serving light workloads, reports Phoronix.

AMD's heterogeneous processors identify CPU types using CPUID Function 0x80000026 (Extended CPU Topology), as EBX bits [31:28] carry the core classification. Up until recently, AMD only classified its cores as Performance and Efficiency, while the latest patch adds Low-Power cores. The patch enables Linux to distinguish between Performance, Efficiency, and Low-Power cores efficiently, and the latter are also correctly supported by AMD's performance management.

According to AMD engineer Vishal Badole, these cores are designed specifically for background and idle tasks where reducing energy consumption is more important than offering high performance.

In recent years, both AMD and Intel released heterogeneous processors featuring both high-performance and energy-efficient types of cores in a bid to wed performance and low power consumption. With its latest CPU platforms, Intel introduced its low-power cores located in the SoC tile to offload light tasks and prolong the battery life of laptops. As it turns out, AMD is going the same route. Although AMD uses two different core types, the underlying architecture is the same. It offers a "dense" core offering that's optimized for space, while Intel uses entirely different microarchitectures.

Beyond the description of the Linux patch, AMD disclosed little about the low-power cores. The company only described them as being optimized for the lowest possible power consumption during background processing and idle operation, but did not reveal how they differ architecturally from today's dense Zen 5c cores. In addition, the kernel patches introduce no new scheduling policies or optimization logic beyond identifying the additional CPU category.

AMD also did not reveal whether these cores are based on the Zen 5, Zen 6, or other future microarchitecture. It should indeed be noted that AMD has traditionally preferred to use the same microarchitecture within one CPU, albeit with different optimizations when it comes to die size (or rather floorplan) and clocks. Such an approach greatly simplifies software development and performance management, but at the cost of higher power consumption compared to what a simplified microarchitecture would have offered.

Loongson Technology has announced the Loongson 3C3000, a new 16-core server processor aimed at low-cost general-purpose server systems. Unveiled on June 26, 2026, via a public corporate release, the chip is based on Loongson’s in-house architecture and is designed for small- and medium-sized business workloads, including file, database, web, and business process servers. Loongson says the 3C3000’s general-purpose computing performance matches that of the company’s earlier 3C5000 server processor.

The Loongson 3C3000 — which is based on a 64-bit architecture and supports the LoongArch instruction set — uses the company’s LA364E processor core design and comes in an FCBGA1371 package measuring 37.5mm by 37.5mm. The chip is pin-compatible with the Loongson 3B6000 processor, which should make it easier for system builders to reuse existing platform designs.

The processor features 16 physical cores and 16 threads, with clock speeds ranging from 1.5 GHz to 1.8 GHz. Each core supports 128-bit vector instructions and three-issue out-of-order execution. Loongson says each core integrates two fixed-point units, one vector unit, and two memory access units.

Cache and memory support are modest by modern server standards, but in line with the chip’s low-cost positioning. Each core includes 64KB of private L1 instruction cache and 64KB of private L1 data cache, while all 16 cores share 16MB of L2 cache. The integrated memory controller supports two 72-bit DDR4-2400 memory channels with ECC support, giving the processor server-class error correction for business and infrastructure workloads.

For expansion, the 3C3000 provides two PCIe x16 interfaces, totaling 32 PCIe lanes. These can be split into up to four x4 or x8 interfaces, depending on platform requirements. The chip also includes another PCIe x16 interface that can be configured as LCL (Loongson Coherent Link) for dual-processor interconnection. Other interfaces include SPI, UART, three I2C interfaces, AVS, and 16 GPIOs.

Loongson lists a typical power consumption of 40W when running at 1.5 GHz. The processor supports dynamic shutdown of the main module clock and dynamic frequency adjustment of the main clock domain, helping reduce power consumption under lighter workloads. It also integrates a Loongson-developed security and trust module that supports Chinese national cryptographic algorithms for encryption and decryption.

Unlike the 36C000, which Loongson says matches Intel’s Xeon, the company is positioning the 3C3000 as a low-cost, high-performance server CPU for customers that need general-purpose compute rather than high-end acceleration or AI performance, slotting it below the higher-core-count 3C6000 server lineup the company launched a year earlier. Support for China’s local software and hardware ecosystem also appears to be a selling point. The company has not publicly disclosed pricing, a common move for server processors, which are often sold through system builders and negotiated enterprise deals rather than as boxed retail chips.

Intel is expected to push the boundaries on power draw with its upcoming Nova Lake series processors, which will rival the best CPUs. According to newly leaked information, the flagship 52-core desktop variant is expected to feature a dual-compute tile architecture with a massive PL2 limit of 474W. The information was shared by LC Tech Leaks and confirmed by Jaykihn, who has a pretty solid track record with Intel hardware.

PL2, or Power Limit 2, represents the maximum power a CPU can draw during short boost periods. That said, a PL2 target of 474W remains quite demanding, although a previous rumor suggests Intel may also have a PL4 emergency power limit over 700W. It is important to note that these power limits may only apply to the top-end models with the dual-tile architecture.

Additionally, the leak also sheds light on the upcoming platform, including the previously rumored LGA1954 socket. We already know that Nova Lake-S will require a new generation of motherboards. Motherboard vendors are expected to classify their boards by sustained PL1 power levels, with configurations for 35W, 65W, 125W, and 175W CPUs. Enthusiast-grade motherboards, likely the Z990 series, are also rumored to feature three EPS 8-pin CPU power connectors instead of the traditional two. While vendors will have the option to include a third connector, its primary purpose would be to support extreme overclocking and would not affect the CPU's rated performance profile.

The upcoming Nova Lake-S lineup is expected to carry the ‘Core Ultra 400S’ moniker and will be Intel's biggest desktop CPU overhaul in years. We’ve previously reported leaked specifications indicating configurations ranging from 6 to 52 cores, with support for DDR5-8000 memory. The flagship 52-core model is expected to feature 16 performance cores, 32 efficiency cores, and a new Big Last Level Cache (bLLC) design to take on AMD's 3D V-Cache gaming dominance. The company is also rumored to introduce integrated Xe3 graphics, Thunderbolt 5, PCIe 5.0 connectivity, and an upgraded NPU for AI workloads.

While these specifications are unconfirmed, it is clear that Intel is targeting substantial gains in gaming, multi-threaded performance, and overall platform capabilities with its next-gen processors.

AMD has brought back its gaming champion from four years ago. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D has been revived in 2026 to breathe new life into the AM4 platform. The Zen 3-based CPU was the best CPU for gaming of its time, thanks to the first-generation 3D V-Cache technology. Since then, however, the competition in our CPU benchmark hierarchy has become more fierce.

Today's competition is Intel’s Core i7-14700K, based on the Raptor Lake Refresh architecture. At the time the Ryzen 7 5800X3D released, Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs were its main competition. Here, we revisit the comparison with Intel’s newer Core i7-14700K, which is available around the same price of $350.

The focus of this faceoff is to determine which CPU is the superior all-around chip. We will put the two CPUs through a series of tests spanning different categories to ultimately determine which CPU you should buy for your system.

This faceoff breaks down how two CPUs compare to each other in a head-to-head battle. If you'd like to read more about either processor, as well as see our full suite of tests, make sure to read our AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D re-review and Core i7-14700K faceoff.

Features and Specifications: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Intel Core i7-14700K

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D was first launched in April 2022 as a part of the Vermeer desktop CPU family. It is based on the Zen 3 architecture and built on TSMC’s 7nm production process. The CPU features 8 cores and 16 threads, with a TDP of 105W and a PPT of 142W. It has a base clock of 3.4 GHz and can boost up to 4.5 GHz.

The 5800X3D only supports DDR4 memory at a rated speed of 3200 MT/s over a dual-channel interface. It is compatible with the AM4 socket, with support for 300-series, 400-series, and 500-series AMD chipsets (though check support with your specific motherboard). It also supports 20 lanes of PCIe Gen 4. However, the 5800X3D does not have integrated graphics.

On a more positive note, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was the first CPU to employ the new 3D V-Cache technology. As a result of stacking the cache vertically on the die, the 5800X3D has a total L3 cache of 96 MB. Of this pool, 64 MB is part of the 3D V-Cache stack. Core overclocking is disabled on the Ryzen 7 5800X3D due to its 3D V-Cache layout; DRAM overclocking still remains available.

Its competitor, Intel’s Core i7-14700K, uses a vastly different layout. It features the Raptor Lake Refresh architecture, which is a refined version of the 13th-generation Raptor Lake base architecture. The Core i7-14700K was launched in October 2023 and was built on a 10nm production process (Intel 7).

Intel’s 14th-generation CPUs use a hybrid core layout with performance-focused “P-cores” and more efficient “E-cores.” The 14700K also follows this structure, featuring 8 P-cores and 12 E-cores, for a total of 20 cores. In the 14700K, Hyper-Threading is only available on the P-cores, so the CPU has a total of 28 threads. The chip can boost the P-cores up to 5.6 GHz, while the E-core boost clock is 4.3 GHz.

Interestingly, the Core i7-14700K supports both DDR4 and DDR5 memory at 3200 MT/s and 5600 MT/s, respectively. The CPU is compatible with the LGA 1700 socket featured in the 600-series and 700-series Intel motherboards. There is also support for 16 PCIe Gen 5 lanes and 4 PCIe Gen 4 lanes.

The Core i7-14700K has a TDP of 125W, with a higher PL2 limit of 253W. Integrated graphics are also offered in the 14700K in the form of UHD Graphics 770. There is 33MB of shared L3 cache on the chip. Perhaps more importantly, the Core i7-14700K is fully unlocked for overclocking, which is a big advantage over its competitor for today, though that requires a Z-series motherboard.

Zooming out a bit, it is clear that the Core i7-14700K is vastly superior to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D on paper. It is a newer CPU, so it has a better feature set, including PCIe Gen 5 and DDR5 support. It offers more cores, a higher boost clock, integrated graphics, and an unlocked multiplier for overclocking.

⭐Winner: Intel Core i7-14700K

Nothing is decided on paper alone, but the Core i7-14700K offers much better specs, newer features, and even has overclocking support. It takes this round quite easily.

Gaming Benchmarks and Performance: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Intel Core i7-14700K

AMD claims to have “re-engineered” the Ryzen 7 5800X3D for its 2026 re-release, so we have tested it again, along with a whole bunch of worthy competitors, including the 14700K. We chose the 1080p resolution for our 16-game test suite in order to maximize the performance differences between the various CPUs. The graphics card used was the GeForce RTX 5090 to keep potential GPU bottlenecks to a minimum. Let’s get into the results.

Starting off with our 16-game FPS geomean at 1080p, the Core i7-14700K dominates the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with an average result of 166.7 FPS across our tested games, compared to the 145.6 FPS result of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. That is a 14.5% difference in favor of the 14700K in our performance geomean. In 1% lows, the 14700K leads the Ryzen 7 5800X3D by 20% on average, putting out 114 FPS against the Ryzen’s 95.

However, there is another side to this benchmark table. The Core i7-14700K supports both DDR4 and DDR5 memory, so we tested it in both configurations. With DDR4-3200 memory, the 14700K’s advantage vanishes, and instead the Ryzen 7 5800X3D leads by 1.04%, or just 1.5 FPS. The 1% lows are in favor of 14700K by only 3 FPS (3.15%), which is astonishingly close.

When the Intel CPU is paired with DDR5 memory, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D’s cache advantage seems to be struggling against the Core i7-14700K’s raw core count and higher boost clock (along with far faster memory speeds). Looking at individual titles, we see a similar pattern with the Core i7-14700K holding a consistent lead over the 5800X3D.

In 007 First Light, the 14700K paired with DDR5 memory has a 25.7% lead on average over the 5800X3D. That lead shrinks to 21.5% in Crimson Desert, and the difference is 13.7% in favor of the 14700K in Cyberpunk 2077. Interestingly, the Core i7-14700K leads the entire pack in Flight Simulator 24, establishing a 26.6% lead over the 5800X3D in this title. The DDR5-equipped 14700K also leads the 5800X3D in Spider-Man 2, Starfield, The Last of Us Part One, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Counter-Strike 2.

However, when the Core i7-14700K is paired with DDR4-3200 memory, the picture changes completely. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D leads the i7-14700K with DDR4 memory in Baldur’s Gate 3 by 11.7%. In Crimson Desert, the lead is 3.2% for the 5800X3D, and 2.6% in Cyberpunk 2077. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D sits between the DDR5 and DDR4 versions of the 14700K in a few other titles, including Counter-Strike 2 and DOOM: The Dark Ages.

There are also some titles in which the Ryzen 7 5800X3D leads both the DDR4 and DDR5-equipped versions of the Core i7-14700K. In F1 2024, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D leads the DDR5 14700K by 5.6%, and the DDR4 14700K by 13.7% on average. The same pattern can be seen in Final Fantasy XIV, with a 6.6% lead over the 14700K using DDR5 memory, and in Minecraft RT, with a 18.5% lead over the 14700K using DDR4 memory.

It is certainly all over the place when you put both configurations of the 14700K into the mix, but the two behave more like separate CPUs. The long and short of it is that the 14700K with DDR5 memory provides the best gaming performance on average, followed by the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The DDR4-equipped 14700K is ever-so-slightly slower than the 5800X3D, but it really just depends on the game you’re playing.

During our testing, the Core i7-14700K averaged 4.93 GHz with DDR5 memory and 4.88 GHz with DDR4 memory. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D could only manage 4.34 GHz, but it sipped only 77.5 watts during our gaming tests. The 14700K DDR5 averaged 132.4 watts, while the DDR4-equipped 14700K averaged a whopping 155.1 watts during gaming. This is why the 14700K with DDR4 reached an average temperature of 80 °C, compared to 62 °C for the 14700K with DDR5 and 59 °C for the 5800X3D.

In addition to running the coolest, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is also the most efficient CPU of the bunch. The 5800X3D had an FPS-per-watt output of 1.88, compared to 1.26 for the Core i7-14700K with DDR5 memory, and just 0.93 for the DDR4 version. It is amazing how much the Core i7-14700K suffers when paired with DDR4 memory.

Lower overall performance also hurts the value proposition of the DDR4-equipped 14700K, as it puts out just 0.39 FPS-per-dollar, compared to the 0.45 of the DDR5-equipped 14700K. Astonishingly, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D falls between the two 14700K versions, delivering 0.42 FPS per dollar. This makes the Core i7-14700K the value king, but only if you pair it with DDR5 memory. I suspect that will be tricky in the current market.

⭐Winner: Tie

While the Ryzen 7 5800X3D does slightly pull away from the DDR4-equipped 14700K, both of these setups get demolished by the 14700K when it is paired with DDR5 memory. We're calling this round a tie considering the massive price disparity between DDR4 and DDR5 memory right now.

Productivity Benchmarks and Performance: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Intel Core i7-14700K

Productivity performance spans single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads, so we tested the CPUs across a range of benchmarks covering both categories. Just like in our gaming tests, we tested the 14700K with both DDR5 and DDR4 memory, since it does impact the performance significantly.

Intel’s hybrid architecture has historically been quite strong at multi-threaded workloads due to E-cores, and that pattern appears here too. In our multi-threaded performance ranking geomean, the Core i7-14700K scores 492 points, a massive lead of 116.7% over the Ryzen 7 5800X3D that could only manage 227 points on average. Even when the Core i7-14700K is paired with DDR4 memory, it has a 105% higher average score than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

The superior core count of the 14700K is proving to be the difference maker in this category. In the Cinebench 2024 multi-core test, the 14700K with DDR5 memory is a whopping 126.6% faster than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Even the DDR4-equipped 14700K secures a 107% lead over the 5800X3D in Cinebench. The lead for the 14700K is about 137% in POV-Ray, and it shrinks to 135% when using DDR4 memory.

Blender tests were also favorable for the 14700K, but we didn’t see a big difference between DDR4 and DDR5 systems in these benchmarks. In Junkshop, the DDR5-equipped 14700K leads the 5800X3D by 116.4%; in Monster, by 116.6%; and in Classroom, by 118.3%. The DDR4 variant follows closely behind, by 1 or 2 percentage points.

The memory generation again comes into play when we look at HandBrake x265 10-bit encoding, with the DDR5-14700K leading the 5800X3D by 90.5%, while the DDR4-14700K manages a 82% lead. The gap is even larger in x264 encoding, with the DDR5 variant gaining a 105% lead over the 5800X3D, while the DDR4 variant can only manage a 63% lead.

That still makes the Core i7-14700K far better than the 5800X3D in productivity workloads, regardless of the memory generation. However, we still have single-threaded results to look at. Our single-threaded performance ranking geomean puts the Core i7-14700K 36.6% faster on average than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Interestingly, there is no difference in single-threaded performance between the DDR5 and DDR4 variants of the 14700K.

The same trend is seen in individual benchmarks as well. The 14700K is about 25% faster than the 5800X3D in Lame’s audio encoding test, and the DDR4 variant is in the same ballpark as well. Curiously, the DDR4-equipped 14700K is slightly faster than the DDR5-14700K in Cinebench 2024 and also outperforms the 5800X3D by 36.6%. Safe to say, the RAM difference doesn’t really come into play in these tests.

Overall, though, the winner is quite clear. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a gaming-oriented chip with only 8 cores and 16 threads, so it is no match for the 20-core 14700K in productivity workloads. Whether you go for DDR4 or DDR5 is your decision, but the productivity champion of this faceoff is the Core i7-14700K.

⭐Winner: Intel Core i7-14700K

With an average lead of 116% over the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in multi-threaded tasks, the Core i7-14700K sweeps the productivity round quite easily.

Overclocking: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Intel Core i7-14700K

Overclocking has never been a strong suit of AMD Ryzen processors; however, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D doesn’t support core overclocking at all. AMD cited the 3D V-Cache technology as the reason the 5800X3D can’t be overclocked, and they were right to assume so.

Due to the vertically-stacked cache, heat transfer from the CPU die to the heatspreader was a real issue. An overclocked 5800X3D would have sipped more power and produced more heat. Therefore, an efficient heat-transfer system was needed but could not be developed in time for the first-generation V-Cache product.

AMD has since reinstated overclocking support for Ryzen 9000 series X3D CPUs by flipping the cache layout, so it no longer hinders heat transfer. However, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D’s core multiplier still remains locked, but you can still tune the DRAM and Infinity Fabric clocks.

The Core i7-14700K, on the other hand, is tailor-made for overclocking. Being a K-series SKU, the 14700K comes with an unlocked multiplier and all the Intel bells and whistles for overclocking. It can reach 6.1 - 6.2 GHz on individual cores with proper cooling, and users can expect a 5.6 - 5.8 GHz all-core overclock on most setups.

Its overclocking toolkit features traditional multiplier adjustments, voltage controls, and established BIOS interfaces that most enthusiasts are already familiar with. The Core i7-14700K also has a significant amount of power headroom to play with, although temperatures become a concern as soon as the power consumption ramps up.

By all overclocking metrics, the Core i7-14700K is the superior CPU for tinkerers. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D can’t be manually tuned, at least not in the traditional sense, and therefore doesn’t really stand a chance in this round.

⭐Winner: Intel Core i7-14700K

The 14700K is the real deal when it comes to overclocking support. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is locked and therefore can’t be overclocked, so Intel sweeps this round.

Power Consumption and Efficiency: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Intel Core i7-14700K

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D has a base TDP of 105W and a PPT of 142W. Intel’s is much higher, with the 14700K clocking in at 125W TDP and a PL2 limit of 253 watts. However, TDP numbers don’t give us a good idea of real-world power consumption, so we ran our own detailed tests.

First, at idle, the 5800X3D consumed only 5 watts, while the 14700K consumed 27 watts. In an active-idle situation, such as YouTube playback, the Core i7-14700K consumed 28 watts with DDR5 memory and a concerning 39 watts with DDR4 memory. The 5800X3D, on the other hand, sipped only 9 watts, making it anywhere from 67% - 76% more efficient than the 14700K.

Moving on to all-core workloads, in our y-cruncher multi-threaded AVX power test, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D consumes 119 watts, while the Core i7-14700K clocks in at a staggering 335 watts, a 181.5% higher figure. Even the Core i7-14700K with DDR4 memory consumed 307 watts, which is still a 158% increase over the 5800X3D’s power consumption.

In Linpack, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is again more reserved, with the 14700K consuming 168.6% more power than the Ryzen. The DDR4 setup was not much better, with a 137.2% higher power consumption than the 5800X3D in this test. The gap widens even more in Cinebench 2024’s multi-core render and our Blender tests, which show the 14700K consuming anywhere from 250% to 285% higher power than the 5800X3D.

In our encoding tests, the situation remains pretty much the same. In Handbrake x264, the DDR5-14700K consumed 242% more power than the 5800X3D, while the DDR4-14700K consumed nearly 200% more. Similar numbers were seen in Handbrake x265 and SVT_AV1 encoding, with the 5800X3D being the clear winner.

We even looked at single-threaded workloads to determine the power consumption of those tasks. In y-cruncher’s single-threaded AVX power test, we saw the 14700K consume 157% more power when paired with DDR5 memory, and 132% more when using DDR4 memory. Safe to say, the Intel CPU does not fare any better in these workloads either.

To determine the efficiency, we calculated the watts-per-FPS number in Handbrake x265. The 5800X3D was 43.4% more efficient than the 14700K with DDR5 RAM, and about 41% more efficient in this task than the 14700K with DDR4 memory. The pattern can again be seen in Cinebench 2024’s efficiency test, where we look at points-per-watt. The 5700X3D is anywhere from 62% to 68% more efficient than the 14700K in this task.

We can also visualize the efficiency differences using our handy scatter plots. In the Linkpack power efficiency plot, the 5800X3D is towards the bottom left of the chart, while the 14700K is more towards the top. This means that the 14700K uses substantially more energy to deliver marginally higher performance than the 5800X3D. Ideally, you want to be towards the bottom right of this graph.

So, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D consumes much less power in both single-threaded and multi-threaded productivity workloads, and as we saw in our gaming tests, it runs cooler as well. The Core i7-14700K has a distinct performance advantage in all-core workloads, but the power consumption ramps up quickly once it gets going. Still, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is the clear winner in this round.

⭐Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D consumes between 150% and 300% less power than the Core i7-14700K in all-core workloads, making it the definitive winner in this round.

Pricing: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Intel Core i7-14700K

The pricing situation is a bit of a wildcard in this comparison, since these are not exactly “new” CPUs. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D was recently re-released at $350, which is $100 lower than its 2022 price tag. The Core i7-14700K is currently priced at $370 at the time of writing, which makes the 5800X3D $20 cheaper in a direct comparison.

However, comparing the two CPUs is more than just comparing their sticker price. We must also look at the platform costs of the two CPUs. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D uses the fan-favorite AM4 socket, which has a whole heap of chipsets in all price brackets. You can pair the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with a mid-range B550 or a high-end X570 motherboard, but older 400-series motherboards are also compatible, depending on the board.

As far as the price goes, B550 motherboards can be purchased for $80 - $180, while higher-end X570 motherboards range from $150 - $300. Some premium models can even go beyond $400, but those are not really needed for our CPU since it doesn’t support overclocking. A nice mid-tier B550 or X570 motherboard will be more than enough for our needs.

Memory is where the price difference really grows. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D only supports DDR4 memory, so it is relatively safe from the ongoing DRAM crisis. A nice 32GB DDR4-3200 kit can run you about $140 - $160, which is definitely higher than DDR4 prices of the past, but nothing compared to current DDR5 rates. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D also needs an aftermarket cooler since it doesn’t come with one, and that can cost you about $100 - $150 too.

For the Core i7-14700K, you have the option of either a DDR4 or a DDR5 motherboard. Even then, you still have to choose between a 600-series or a 700-series chipset. For the sake of this comparison, let’s go with a Z790 motherboard since the 14700K is unlocked and we want those overclocking capabilities. A basic Z790 motherboard can be found around the $150 mark, but we would want to go with something that has decent VRMs. That can cost around $200-$250 at current prices.

Of course, as evidenced in our benchmarks, DDR5 memory is the best way to maximize the 14700K's performance. Due to the RAMpocalypse, DDR5 memory is ridiculously expensive, and a 32GB DDR5-6000 kit can cost between $390 - $550 at the time of writing. Going with DDR4 would require a motherboard swap, but it would save you between $300 and $350 on the system based on these two components alone.

For cooling, the 14700K requires special consideration, as we have the option to overclock. Even a stock 14700K sips more power and produces more heat than a 5800X3D, but if you plan to overclock, the thermals can get out of hand pretty quick. You’ll ideally use a solid 360mm AiO liquid cooler for the 14700K, which can add about $100 - $150 to the cost of your build.

Another factor to consider when determining the value of a CPU is the longevity of its platform. AMD’s AM4 platform has been going strong for a decade, and AMD has continued to support it through updates and releases such as the 5800X3D. However, it would be hard to see AMD releasing more CPUs for the AM4 platform going forward.

On the other hand, Intel’s LGA 1700 socket was already semi-retired, but new reports suggest that Intel will bring this platform back in early 2027. New “Raptor Lake Next” CPUs will reportedly be available on the same socket and the same motherboards, so there is certainly a better upgrade path on Intel’s side.

When we put everything together, the Core i7-14700K is a bit hard to recommend from a value perspective. The motherboards for the 14700K are more expensive on average, and if you want to maximize its performance, you will have to take a massive hit to your wallet with DDR5 memory. Moreover, it is more expensive to cool, too. Its platform looks more future-proof in light of recent rumors, but that can’t guarantee it a win in this round.

⭐Winner: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D

The 5800X3D is cheaper to get up and running, since you only need an affordable B550 motherboard and some DDR4 memory to get started. The 14700K can be cheap, but that requires you to leave serious performance on the table and go with a DDR4 setup.

Bottom Line: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Intel Core i7-14700K

After a grueling 6-round back-and-forth, we finally have our winner. The Intel Core i7-14700K is the superior CPU of the two. Now, it is not as black-and-white as the 4-3 score might suggest, but the 14700K is still the winner of this faceoff.

The Core i7-14700K delivers better gaming performance on average than the 5800X3D. Sure, there are some titles that favor AMD’s 3D V-Cache, but those wins were not as frequent. However, AMD’s 5800X3D has a better chance if the 14700K is limited by DDR4 memory.

Intel’s 14700K is also vastly superior in productivity and has support for manual overclocking. AMD’s main selling point for the 5800X3D in 2026 is its low price, both upfront and in terms of platform costs. It is also an easier CPU to maintain since it runs cooler and consumes less power.

Interestingly, the choice also depends heavily on your memory generation of choice. It is better to save a few bucks and go with a 5800X3D if you plan to stay on DDR4 for now. However, if you are willing to make the (difficult) jump to DDR5, the 14700K is the clear choice.

Potential buyers who want to stick to gaming should still prioritize a Ryzen 7 5800X3D over a Core i7-14700K with DDR5 memory. On the other hand, if you regularly run any type of productivity workload, the 14700K blows the Ryzen out of the water.

⭐ Winner: Intel Core i7-14700K

Nonetheless, the overall winner of our faceoff is Intel’s Core i7-14700K.

Check Out More CPU Faceoffs

• Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
• Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus vs AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
• AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D vs AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• Intel Core i7-14700K vs Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 vs Ryzen 9 9950X3D

Scalpers are moving in on AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition. The new CPU, which is identical to the original but "re-engineered" for a new bonding process, is on sale officially today, June 29. We've been keeping track of inventory and haven't seen the chip available for more than a few minutes — and amid the flurry, scalpers are stepping in and asking for $600 or more for the chip on the secondhand market, sometimes doubling the CPU's $350 MSRP.

Over on eBay, most listings for the chip are above $600, with some asking for $750 or more. Worse, they've sold for that price. Looking at sold listings, at least two of the CPUs sold today, one for $540 and another for $585. Most of the listings just use the stock product photo, but some scalpers have an actual CPU in-hand.

Micro Center has the chip available for sale, standalone or as part of a bundle with a motherboard and RAM, and it's exclusively available in Micro Center stores. Presumably some scalpers went to buy a chip at Micro Center this morning to flip it on eBay in the afternoon.

Although it's easy to get caught up in the rush of a new release (or old release, in this case), we don't recommend giving into scalper prices. Rumors have circulated that the 10th Anniversary Edition is a limited-time run, but that's not the case. AMD says it plans on continuing to make the CPU, so we should see inventory stabilize eventually.

We have some placeholder listings available. Again, we've seen inconsistent inventory throughout the morning, so check back at these retailers regularly:

• 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition at Newegg
• 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition at Best Buy
• 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition at B&H

We've been checking retailer listings all morning, and we've only briefly seen the chip in stock. Online, some buyers claim they've secured a CPU through Newegg, but we haven't been able to successfully move through the checkout process yet. We also haven't seen the chip come back in stock on AMD's direct web store yet.

Because of that, it looks like retailers are doing something of a staggered rollout. There's a good chance we'll see more inventory released throughout the day, so make sure to check back at retailers.

We just re-reviewed the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to evaluate how the CPU stacks up to the current market at its new $350 suggested retail price. If you already have an AM4 motherboard and memory to go with the CPU, it's a good choice at $350. Otherwise, there are better options.

AMD's newer Ryzen 7 7600X3D is just as fast in applications, despite sporting fewer cores, and it's around 15% faster in games. Meanwhile, Intel's Core i7-14700K paired with DDR4 matches the 5800X3D in games and offers around twice the multithreaded performance. With DDR5, the Core i7-14700K wins across the board.

AMD answered the demands of gamers and re-released the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, though not without compromise. Although the return of Zen 3 X3D has been a good idea for months, given the limited time we saw those chips on the market, this re-release comes with a surprisingly high price, considering the silicon and how it compares to the best CPUs for gaming.

Price is the biggest issue for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. AMD shaved $100 off the original MSRP for the 10th Anniversary Edition re-release, but that puts it in very competitive waters, even considering current RAM prices. The CPU is flanked on one side by the Core i7-14700K that also supports DDR4 memory, and on the other by the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, which offers superior gaming performance and a lower price to offset the cost of a DDR5 platform.

The chip mainly appeals to those who already have an AM4 motherboard and memory to go with it, and who were unfortunate enough to miss the small window when you could buy the Ryzen 7 5800X3D a few years ago. In that situation, just about any price is a deal compared to the competition.

Otherwise, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is about $70 to $100 too expensive, and even that lower price would be questionable if DDR5 prices weren’t out of control. Although the chip has earned its legendary status among gamers, revisiting it in 2026 shows clearly that it maxes out what DDR4 platforms are capable of in games, and it falls far too short of the DDR4 competition in applications.

The island of AM4 users stranded without a clear upgrade path will love the 5800X3D re-release. But the chip is not nearly as impressive as it once was if you have to buy a motherboard and/or RAM alongside your CPU, however.

Some notes on this re-review

We don’t normally re-review products here at Tom’s Hardware, much less update existing reviews outside of some extraordinary circumstance. We will follow up reviews with additional coverage as needed, but our reviews are as much buying advice at the time they’re written as they are historical context years down the road. Reviews exist in the context in which they’re written.

That’s important because, especially with PC hardware, some good products can become worse over time and bad products can become good over time. Even in this past generation, AMD had several stumbles with Zen 5, which it addressed post-launch through a combination of firmware updates and exposing additional settings in the BIOS. Intel had some major regressions in performance with Arrow Lake, which it partially addressed after release with Core 200S Boost.

These products are better now than they were at launch, but it’s still important to know that they had issues at launch. That’s the function of our reviews. They’re a snapshot of how a particular component performs and compares to the rest of the market at a certain point in time. Our list of the best CPUs for gaming and CPU benchmark hierarchy pagesare where you’ll find the consistent updates on which chips are best at any given time.

That preamble is to say that this re-review of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D does not replace our original review, which is why this is a separate piece of content and not merely an update. We’re re-reviewing the chip because AMD is re-releasing it, and we need to compare the chip to the current market it exists in.

That market includes high memory prices, which is a driving force behind the re-release of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in the first place. We’re paying especially close attention to memory in this review, both in terms of price and performance. However, we’ve also brought some price-competitive DDR5 chips into the mix, including some of AMD’s own CPUs.

Finally, we’re reviewing the original Ryzen 7 5800X3D here. AMD says that the new 10th Anniversary Edition should be identical to the original model, but it’s using a slightly different bonding process, which could have a minor impact on power and thermals, in particular. We’ll be getting a 10th Anniversary Edition into the lab in order to find out, but we don’t expect major performance differences between the original and re-release versions.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D specifications and pricing

It’s difficult to evaluate the specs of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D given the current market, so this is a refresher of what the processor offers and how it compares to some of the current options featured in our test suite. It’s an eight-core / 16-thread chip sporting AMD’s Zen 3 architecture, and it boosts up to 4.5 GHz, with a base clock of 3.4 GHz.

The chip is fabricated on TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process, with GlobalFoundries stepping in to fab the I/O die on its 12nm process. Of course, the main draw of the CPU is the 64MB chunk of SRAM that’s bonded to the compute die, giving the processor access to a total of 96MB of L3 cache.

In recent years, we’ve seen both AMD and Intel increase cache sizes broadly, not just on X3D CPUs. For instance, the Ryzen 7 9700X has the same 32MB of on-board L3 that we can see all the way back to Zen 3, but it has double the L2 cache. Intel has traditionally split L2 and L3 more evenly, and we’ve seen an increase in both with Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh.

Still, the huge boost in L3 helps a lot here. It comes with some thermal trade-offs, however. Although the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a very efficient CPU, it also has careful power management. The SRAM sits on top of the compute die, insulating the cores from the IHS. This thermal design means the Ryzen 7 5800X3D has relatively low peak clock speeds out of the box, and it doesn’t officially support AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive.

AMD has addressed that issue in newer X3D chips, riding the efficiency of Zen 4 with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and moving to a new bonding process that situates the SRAM below the compute die with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

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Although the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was a revelation when it first released, it’s important to remember that it wasn’t leagues faster than Intel’s competing Alder Lake chips, at least not on the level of the 30%+ delta we see today with Arrow Lake and the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The pedigree that 3D V-Cache has built comes in part from the newer X3D chips, and that’s clear when looking back at the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

Even more clear is the split between DDR4 and DDR5. Now that we have Raptor Lake (and Refresh) as a comparison point, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D positions itself as the peak of what DDR4 platforms are capable of in games. It’s marginally faster than the Core i7-13700K and Core i7-14700K with DDR4 memory, 17% ahead of the Core i7-12700K with DDR4, and even 4.5% ahead of the Core i7-12700K with DDR5.

This wall that you can see, around 145 fps in our geomean, directly translates into a handful of the games we tested. Especially among the newer titles in our suite, simply moving to DDR5 memory results in more than a 31% increase in performance on the same CPU. That led to a handful of situations where both Raptor Lake CPUs perform worse than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with DDR4, but offer double-digit improvements with DDR5.

Based on our RAM price tracker, a 32GB kit of DDR5-6000 runs between $400 and $450 currently, while a 32GB kit of DDR4-3200 will run you between $200 and $250. There are plenty of exceptions, for better and worse, but we’re going to call the price difference between DDR4 and DDR5, right now, about $200.

Establishing that number is important because of one CPU: AMD’s own Ryzen 5 7600X3D. It’s on the AM5 platform and requires DDR5, but it’s also $230, $120 less than what AMD is re-releasing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D at. Assuming our lowest RAM prices, that means the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is around 14% more expensive than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D when memory is brought into the price. But the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is also 18% more performant.

That’s the biggest hurdle standing in the way of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Even if you already have DDR4 memory, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D and 16GB of DDR5-6000 is only around $80 more expensive, and much more performant. Plus, it gets you on an AM5 platform, setting up cheaper future upgrades (AMD says AM5 will receive support through at least 2029).

In Intel’s camp, the two Raptor Lake chips with DDR4 run up against a similar wall as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but offer around a 15% jump with DDR5. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D still makes sense if you already have an AM4 board. However, if you have to buy a motherboard, the Raptor Lake chips offer similar gaming performance with DDR4 and much better application performance, which we’ll get to next.

Elsewhere, there aren’t a lot of surprises. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is as efficient as ever, drawing just 77.5W on average in our testing. AMD has pushed efficiency even further now, but it’s remarkable to see the Ryzen 7 5800X3D offering similar performance as the Core i7-14700K with DDR4, while consuming half the power.

We also have our value geomean here, which is deceptive. Obviously the price of memory is a huge influence here, not only on total platform cost, but also on performance. The value geomean here just represents a true CPU-to-CPU comparison of value, devoid of RAM context.

007 First Light Benchmarks

The first game in our suite is the newest, which is 007 First Light. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D surprisingly struggles in this title, which is strange given how well IO Interactive’s previous title, Hitman 3, took to 3D V-Cache CPUs. Still, the Raptor Lake chips are ahead here, even with DDR4, and they claim top slots with DDR5.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Benchmarks

Baldur’s Gate 3 favors X3D chips, which is clear based on the fact that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is just a touch behind the much newer Ryzen 7 9700X. The 5800X3D is also around 11% faster than the Raptor Lake chips with DDR4 memory. However, the Raptor Lake chips with DDR5 are about 20% faster than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, while the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is around 35% faster.

Crimson Desert Benchmarks

In Crimson Desert, the 5800X3D outpaces the Raptor Lake competition by a few frames, but this game clearly favors faster memory. It also scales oddly well on Raptor Lake chips, as evidenced by the fact that the Core i7-14700K outclasses the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus.

Counter-Strike 2 Benchmarks

Counter-Strike 2 is more competitive, with only the Ryzen 7 7800X3D offering a clear lead above the rest of the pack. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is marginally ahead of the Raptor Lake chips with DDR4 here, and even moving to DDR5 doesn’t offer a significant improvement.

Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmarks

Cyberpunk 2077 is another clear example of the memory divide that’s growing between DDR4 and DDR5. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D tops the DDR4 rankings by a few frames, but moving to DDR5 on Raptor Lake offers roughly a 15% performance jump.

Doom: The Dark Ages Benchmarks

When we brought up a 31% gap in DDR4 and DDR5 performance earlier, we were referring to Doom: The Dark Ages. This is a fairly recent game that’s clearly designed with DDR5 in mind. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D does surprisingly well, though, offering a 10.8% jump over the Raptor Lake competition with DDR4.

F1 24 Benchmarks

F1 2024 slants heavily toward AMD processors, and it’s a game that scales well with 3D V-Cache. Here, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is around 5% faster than the Core i7-14700K with DDR5, and 13% faster with DDR4. The Ryzen 5 7600X3D spoils the fun a bit, though, offering a solid 10% jump over the 5800X3D.

Far Cry 6 Benchmarks

Final Fantasy XIV Benchmarks

Final Fantasy XIV scales well with X3D chips, with the three 3D V-Cache CPUs in our test pool topping the rankings. The 5800X3D takes a clear backseat to the DDR5 CPUs, but it still manages a solid 6.6% improvement over the Core i7-14700K with DDR5 and a 16% jump with DDR4.

Flight Simulator 2024 Benchmarks

Flight Simulator 24 leans back toward Intel, with the 5800X3D only managing to outclass the Core i7-12700K with DDR4. In this game, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is around 18% faster, while the Core i7-14700K is 11% faster, even with DDR4.

Hogwarts Legacy Benchmarks

We can see a similar situation in Hogwarts Legacy, with the Core i7-14700K paired with DDR4 outpacing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D by about 12%. The Ryzen 5 7600X3D, meanwhile, is more than 20% ahead, while the Core i7-14700K with DDR5 marks a 25% lead.

Marvel Rivals Benchmarks

Marvel Rivals is an Unreal Engine 5 game, and it’s mostly bound by the GPU, which explains the stair-step pattern you can see in our data. We can see a clear divide between DDR4 and DDR5 platforms here, with even the Ryzen 5 7600X offering superior performance.

Minecraft RTX Benchmarks

Intel struggles in Minecraft, while X3D chips run away with performance. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D ends up in the middle of the pack, offering a clear buff of around 18% over the Raptor Lake competition but falling short of even AMD’s weaker DDR5 options.

Spider-Man 2 Benchmarks

Starfield Benchmarks

The Last of Us Part One Benchmarks

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The Ryzen 7 5800X3D was a weak CPU for productivity when it was released, and it hasn’t aged particularly well since then on that front. The clock speed is limited compared to non-X3D Zen 3 chips. Add to that the limitations of DDR4 platforms more broadly in non-gaming applications, and it's clear the 5800X3D was never destined for high marks here.

Even compared to the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, the 5800X3D is only 4.6% faster, which is bad considering the latter CPU has access to 33% more threads. Intel’s hybrid architecture boosts core counts, allowing Team Blue to dominate the top of our multithreaded performance rankings.

The CPU to call out here is the Core i7-14700K, particularly paired with DDR4 memory. It’s more than twice as fast as the 5800X3D in our multithreaded geomean, while offering similar gaming performance. Again, we can see this dilemma for the 5800X3D, where the 14700K is a better all-around CPU with DDR4, while the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is a superior DDR5 CPU for not much more money (even considering the price of DDR5).

Turning to single-threaded performance, the playing field levels out, short of the 5800X3D, which even loses out to the Ryzen 7 5700X due to its limited clock speed (the 5700X boosts 100 MHz higher).

Rendering Benchmarks

Rendering apps factor heavily in our overall multithreaded geomean, so the individual results here largely mirror what you can see in the geomean above. In Cinebench 2024, the Core i7-14700K with DDR4 still offers more than double the performance of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and it pushes higher with DDR5. We can see a similar situation in the newer Cinebench 2026.

Single-core results are especially weak considering the Ryzen 7 5800X3D’s limited boost potential. DDR5 isn’t much of a factor here. Although we can see some scaling on the Raptor Lake platforms when moving to DDR5, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is limited in rendering apps, even by DDR4 standards.

Blender shows similar disparities, with the six-core Ryzen 5 7600X3D largely matching the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, despite sporting a 33% reduction in thread count.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a gaming CPU, pure and simple, so we never expected any miracles here. However, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is offering comparable performance on a DDR5 platform for less money, while shooting ahead in games. And the Core i7-14700K offers much better productivity performance and comparable gaming performance, even when paired with DDR4.

Encoding Benchmarks

Encoding is similarly a major factor in our geomean, though with a more even split between lightly- and heavily-threaded workloads. Starting with the latter, Handbrake is an all-out workload for any consumer CPU that leans on high core counts, power limits, and clock speeds. With an x265 10-bit encode, even the Core i7-12700K with DDR4 is 39% ahead of the 5800X3D, while the Core i7-14700K with DDR4 shoots ahead, scoring 82% lead. AV1 and X264 show similar gaps.

The LAME audio encoder provides a closer look at single-threaded encoding workloads, and once again, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D struggles. It was the worst performer in the test pool running a standard LAME encode, and the gap between it and the more performant options in our test pool only grows in the extended run.

Creator App Benchmarks

Perhaps the biggest area of crosstalk with gaming is creator applications. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a bit more impressive here compared to our rendering and encoding workloads, often matching the Core i7-12700K with DDR4 memory. Still, it ends up at the bottom of our rankings, with newer Raptor Lake and DDR5 CPUs offering better performance.

Photoshop is an app that leans toward AMD chips, though that’s mainly with newer Zen 5 chips. For the 5800X3D, the Core i7-14700K offers a 10% performance jump with DDR4. Things are a bit more competitive in Premiere Pro, with the limitation of DDR4 platforms becoming abundantly clear in our data.

Outside of the Adobe suite, we have DaVinci Resolve, which isn’t as lopsided as Photoshop with recent AMD CPUs. Here, even DDR4 Raptor Lake options are near the top of the chart. The 5800X3D secures a minor win over the 7600X3D and 5700X, but not by a meaningful margin.

Finally, After Effects offers a look at VFX performance. AMD’s 5800X3D especially struggles here, with the Core i7-12700K with DDR4 offering a 13% boost in overall performance. With DDR5, that lead jumps to 22.9%.

Web and Office Benchmarks

In lighter web and office workloads, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D still struggles. Most basic productivity and web applications are lightly-threaded, so it makes sense to see the 5800X3D would fall below the marks we can see in creator apps. Across all of the workloads here, the 5800X3D is either at the bottom of the pile or just narrowly outclasses the 5700X.

That doesn’t mean you’ll run into major performance issues. The workloads here are relatively light, and they’re suitable for far weaker CPUs than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. We’re mainly looking at general application performance for browsers and lightly-threaded apps here, which is an area where the 5800X3D struggles.

Chess Engines, Compilation, Compression, AVX, and Other Benchmarks

Finally, we have a range of benchmarks examining code compilation, chess engines, database workloads, and far more. The 5800X3D is a gaming CPU, and these workloads are highly targeted at specific applications. There are some workloads where the 5800X3D shines, such as the ebizzy web server test, SQLite database test, and Linpack. However, it mostly lands at the bottom of the pile when looking at workloads more broadly.

We’ve certainly seen a benefit from a larger L3 cache for specialized workloads (see our Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 review for more), but that’s not the draw here. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is weak in most productivity apps, so unless you plan on running a server and somehow gaming on the same machine, I wouldn’t weigh these results too heavily.

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AMD’s X3D CPUs are known for their efficiency, and although those efficiency gains mainly show up with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, the 5800X3D is no slouch. Power is carefully limited on the chip, with it peaking at just 119W in our y-cruncher test. In the same test, the Core i7-14700K drew 335W.

Y-cruncher leverages AVX instructions, pushing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to consume more power compared to the 7800X3D. In an all-out, non-AVX workload like Cinebench 2024, the two CPUs are in lockstep. Again, we can see the Raptor Lake competition dancing with 300W across configurations.

Blender and Handbrake tell a similar story, but efficiency is what’s important here, given how broad the performance window is for the chips in our test pool (particularly in applications). The 5800X3D is much more efficient than the 13700K and 14700K. The margins are also narrower than raw power consumption.

The efficiency picture is clearer with a scatterplot, where we can see a clear separation between the AMD and Intel chips in our test pool. Short of the Core Ultra 270K Plus, there’s a compromise. AMD’s options are much less performant but consume far less power, while Intel's options are generally the opposite.

One upside of the 5800X3D, in particular, is its low idle power consumption. With Zen 4 and Zen 5, we saw a massive increase in power consumption in both idle and active idle (YouTube playback) scenarios. With both the Zen 3 chips in our test pool, we can see a return to single-digit power draw under idle circumstances.

Test Setup

We try to minimize the differences between our test platforms to keep our results consistent, which is especially important here given that we used so many different platforms. Even with big differences, we used the same OS image that’s specifically tailored for testing and frozen to avoid updates skewing our results as we test.

In addition to standardising our OS, we standardise our BIOS settings. We test with XMP/EXPO enabled on memory kits that we’ve validated for stability on the platforms we use. We also disable VBS in the BIOS and turn on ReBAR.

Modern AMD and Intel CPUs come with sophisticated boosting algorithms, but they aren’t always covered by warranty. AMD doesn’t cover PBO, for instance, and Intel doesn’t warranty the “Extreme” power profile that’s common on motherboards. Because of the lack of warranty coverage, we test with PBO disabled and Intel’s power profile set at its default settings.

• MORE: Best CPU for gaming
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At $350, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D really only makes sense if you already have an AM4 motherboard and DDR4 memory to go along with it. That’s not a small audience, especially considering the relatively short time the original Ryzen 7 5800X3D was available on the market. But if you need to buy a motherboard and/or memory for your upgrade, there are better options at this price.

The 5800X3D re-release is a victim of poor pricing. The chip taps out DDR4 platforms in gaming performance, but we’re closing in on half a decade with mainstream DDR5 platforms, and we’ve seen much more powerful CPUs in that time. And yet, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D’s price hasn’t moved significantly away from its original $450 MSRP.

If RAM prices weren’t out of control, a $350 price tag on the Ryzen 7 5800X3D would look insane given the current options around that price. As I’m writing this, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is on sale for less than $350. And even considering current RAM prices, the Core i7-14700K and Ryzen 5 7600X3D are compelling alternatives.

On the productivity front, the Core i7-14700K is a clear winner, even with DDR4 memory. There are some titles where the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is faster than the Core i7-14700K is when paired with DDR4. But overall, they offer similar gaming performance. Especially now that AMD has turned its attention to AM5, the Core i7-14700K is a better all-around option if you don’t already have an AM4 motherboard.

Although AMD almost always comes out on top with platform longevity, Intel is surprisingly ahead in that regard in the Ryzen 7 5800X3D versus Core i7-14700K matchup. Intel is reportedly set to launch Raptor Lake Next on the LGA 1700 socket next year, though I suspect any performance benefits that come along with it will require an upgrade to DDR5.

On the gaming front, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D does a lot of work. It requires DDR5, but that’s partially offset by the fact that it’s $120 cheaper than the 5800X3D. Factoring in RAM or not, spending a bit more on the Ryzen 5 7600X3D not only nets you much higher performance in games, it also gives you an AM5 platform that you can easily upgrade in the future.

That doesn’t discredit the island that AM4 users are currently on. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D left the market fairly quickly, and given the popularity of AM4, it stands to reason that there’s a large group of people for whom the 5800X3D is a significant upgrade. For that group, it’s the CPU of legend you’ve heard so much about. But if you’re planning on buying a motherboard and/or RAM with your new CPU, shop around a bit more.

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Asus has started rolling out beta BIOS updates that restore Transparent Secure Memory Encryption (TSME) support to several AM5 motherboards, making it one of the first board vendors to implement AMD’s promised fix after the company was criticized for quietly removing the feature from non-Pro Ryzen CPUs.

According to VideoCardz, the beta BIOS files — which cover several ROG Crosshair, ROG Strix, TUF Gaming, and ProArt boards based on AMD’s X870, B850, and X670 chipsets — were reportedly shared through the ASUS ROG forum by overclocker SAFEDISK and include support for “GNR Transparent Secure Memory Encryption,” with GNR referring to Granite Ridge, AMD’s Ryzen 9000 desktop CPU family.

The BIOS updates are based on AGESA ComboAM5 PI 1.3.0.1b Patch A and appear to restore TSME support for non-Pro Ryzen 9000 processors earlier than AMD’s previously stated July timeline. X870 boards mostly move to BIOS 2401; B850 boards move to BIOS 1686; and X670 boards move to BIOS 3901 or 3886, depending on the model.

AMD officially confirmed to Tom's Hardware last week that it will reinstate memory encryption on Ryzen 9000 CPUs via a BIOS update, following “valuable community feedback.” AMD users had strongly expressed disapproval after the company silently removed TSME support from Non-Pro CPUs. TSME is a security feature that protects CPUs against physical exploits by encrypting the data stored in memory, making it unusable to physical attackers.

A user discovered that the feature was no longer available on his Ryzen 7 9700X system, even though it was enabled in the BIOS. Further testing involving MSI showed that consumer Ryzen chips could report TSME support under older firmware, but not after a newer AGESA update, while Ryzen Pro processors continued to support it. After countless reactions, AMD moved to fix the issue, setting July as the timeline for reinstating the feature via a BIOS update.

The Asus update now suggests the fix is beginning to arrive earlier than AMD’s July timeline, positioning the company as one of the first board makers to package the reinstatement into actual motherboard firmware. However, this is not yet the broad, stable rollout most users will be waiting for. The files are beta BIOS releases shared through the ASUS ROG forum, so users who specifically need TSME may want to track them closely, while anyone running a production or stability-critical system should probably wait for final BIOS builds.

Unless you have several extra hundred dollars to burn, it’s virtually impossible to build a PC right now, even as Prime Day deals start rolling out. You’ll spend more than twice as much (sometimes three times as much) on a kit of DDR5 memory as you would just a year ago, and SSD prices have shot up so much that a decent NVMe drive can rival the price of a graphics card. The key to skirting the worst part of these price hikes is to shop for bundles.

If you regularly browse Tom’s Hardware, you’ve probably seen us cover bundle deals before. We’ve seen a massive increase in their availability and discount rate over the past few months, specifically when a CPU and motherboard are bundled with RAM and/or an SSD. That isn’t an accident. It’s a concentrated effort by retailers, motherboard vendors, and CPU brands to move product in a time when RAM prices have hamstrung the consumer market.

Those bundles are starting to proliferate online. Originally starting at Newegg online and Micro Center in-store, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of bundles available just about everywhere. Some of these bundles will unlock a reasonable price for building a rig. Others offer little more than some pocket change for the trouble of shelling out money at inflated prices. We’re going to help you separate the wheat from the chaff.

We’re going to run down a few bundle deals that are live for Prime Day to kickstart your next build, as well as provide a bit of context on why we’re seeing so many bundles and why the discounts on them are so high. Our focus here is DDR5, as that’s the biggest hurdle you need to overcome when building a new PC right now. DDR4 bundles are available, as well, though much of the focus is on newer platforms.

Bundle deals typically sell out quickly. We will try to keep this list updated with new bundles as we go throughout Prime Day, so check back throughout the week for fresh deals.

A midrange DDR5 bundle with the Ryzen 5 9600X and 1TB of storage for $635

If you want to get started on a DDR5 build, this bundle from Newegg has everything you need. It includes the Ryzen 5 9600X at the heart of the machine with six Zen 5 cores and 12 threads, alongside a 16GB kit of Team Group memory clocked at DDR5-6000 and a 1TB Patriot P410 SSD. The motherboard is a MSI Pro B850-S, which is decent considering the entry-level design.

The motherboard is a full ATX design, so it should fit in most PC cases outside of small form factor options. I/O is fairly limited, but you still get an internal USB-C header, along with two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, four USB 3.0 ports, and 2.5Gb Ethernet. The board also has two M.2 slots attached, along with a block of four SATA 6 Gb connectors for additional storage.

As for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Teamgroup memory, it’s all you need to get started with a modern gaming rig. 32GB of memory is ideal, but the 16GB kit included in this bundle only occupies two of the four DIMM slots on our motherboard, so sizing up down the line is always an option. The Patriot P410 is a PCIe 4.0 SSD and it comes with 1TB of storage, giving you plenty of room to install your OS and apps.

For a kicker, Newegg includes a free $80 Cooler Master Elite Liquid 240 all-in-one liquid cooler with the bundle. Although the discount may not seem like much, this bundle essentially cuts the DDR5 price down to normal levels while maintaining the list price of the Ryzen 5 9600X and Gigabyte motherboard.

A high-end Intel build with the 270K Plus for under $800

For most builds, 32GB of DDR5 memory is the sweet spot, so it’s no surprise that we see bigger discounts on bundles that include 32GB. Such is the case with this Core Ultra 7 270K Plus bundle, which includes the chip, a midrange Z890 motherboard from ASRock, and 32GB of G.Skill Trident Z5 memory at DDR5-6000. The bundle is 22% off, but that really sells short how good of a deal it is; the memory alone normally costs $510. That extra $260 buys you a Z890 motherboard and Intel’s most impressive CPU to date.

Although Arrow Lake has earned rightful criticism, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is among the best CPUs for gaming. It’s one of Intel’s two ‘Arrow Lake Refresh’ CPUs that come with massive performance improvements over the base range. Even at its affordable price, the 270K Plus is Intel’s fastest productivity CPU around, and it’s just a hair short of outclassing the Core i9-14900K in games.

The motherboard is ASRock’s Z890 Pro RS, which critically includes a Z-series chipset, allowing you to overclock the 270K Plus. It comes with dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and four USB 2.0 ports. There are four M.2 slots on board, one of which supports PCIe 5.0 x4. Two others support PCIe 4.0, while the last one can operate in either PCIe 4.0 x4 or SATA3 modes. This particular board lacks Wi-Fi (and by extension Bluetooth), so you’ll need to purchase a separate add-in card.

Finally, the Tridzen Z5 RGB memory. This is the memory we use on our own CPU test beds here at Tom’s Hardware, and it’s on the Qualified Vendor List (QVL) of most major motherboards (including the board included here).

Top-shelf gaming performance with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D for $900

The gold standard for a gaming PC these days is one of AMD’s 3D V-Cache CPUs, and in particular, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D or 9800X3D, AMD’s most recent eight-core X3D parts. This bundle includes the last-gen 7800X3D, which, despite being slower than the 9800X3D, still beats everything else in our CPU benchmark hierarchy. Alongside the chip is a 342GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-6000 memory and an MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk Wi-Fi motherboard.

Despite coming from the Tomahawk range, this MSI motherboard is solid. It includes Wi-Fi 7 and 5Gb LAN for networking, along with a PCIE 5.0 x16 slot for your GPU and two Gen5 M.2 slots (alongside two Gen4 slots). Around the back, you get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, three USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and four USB 2.0 ports, alongside dual 40Gb USB-C connections.

For the memory, we’ve found that 6000 MT/s is the sweet spot for Ryzen CPUs, and even then, X3D chips don’t need super-fast memory. The kit here is a 2 x 16GB kit, giving you two free DIMM slots to expand in the future.

Why bundle deals are so popular, and why we’re seeing more of them

Most bundle deals aren’t anything to get excited about. How they typically work is that a retailer wants to move more product, and in order to do so, they offer a small discount on multiple products in a bundle. This move is a major factor in why physical Micro Center locations are still so popular; bundle a CPU and motherboard together, and get them for $20 or $30 off. What we’re seeing today is different.

Outside of retailer bundles, we occasionally see bundles that are subsidized elsewhere. Maybe Intel or AMD, or a motherboard vendor, is running a promotion, and so they offer a rebate on components bundled on sale to a retailer. With current RAM and SSD prices, we’re seeing everyone pitch in.

Vendors tell Tom’s Hardware that motherboard sales have been hit hard by RAM prices, and industry reports suggest sales have dropped as much as 37% at some retailers. Motherboard vendors are in a unique position. Unlike the GPU shortages of years past, motherboards are downstream from RAM. If you can’t afford RAM, you’re probably not going to buy a new CPU or motherboard, even if the prices on those components are good (and they are right now).

So, AMD and Intel, alongside motherboard vendors and retailers, are working together to subsidize these kits. Module houses (the companies that package memory) might be kicking in, as well, but it’s hard to say. Most companies I’ve asked tell me that the specific details of each deal are different, so it’s some combination of all these companies working together on bundle deals.

Regardless, it’s in the interest of AMD, Intel, motherboard vendors, retailers, and, to a lesser degree, even module houses, to get prices down. As long as they’re inflated, the downstream sales impact hits all of them, and bundles allow all of these companies to split the burden of subsidizing high RAM prices.

If you're a gamer, the best CPU you can buy is going to come from AMD right now, and the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is going to be on your shortlist. While it isn't technically the most powerful chip on the market anymore, the 9800X3D is still an absolute powerhouse performer and our top pick for best gaming CPU in 2026, and it's just hit its lowest ever price in the UK on Amazon, costing just £339.99.

● Check out this deal on Amazon

The data from Camelcamelcamel confirms what we know about Amazon's price, and an early check across the other big tech retailers in the UK points to a minimum £30 price drop compared to the cost elsewhere. There are few CPUs that offer the reputation that the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Until very recently, it was the fastest CPU for gaming in the world, and it's still our best pick overall. This 8-core, 16-thread processor features AMD's newest Zen 5 architecture and comes equipped with a boost clock speed of up to 5.2 GHz.

The performance upgrade, however, is really noticeable in one area: the cache. These 3D V-cache chips feature a boosted 96MB L3 cache capacity, stacked beneath the CPU cores, closer to the integrated heat spreader on a reconfigured die. For gaming, that means that it doesn't need to drop down and rely on the slower system RAM, reducing latency and ensuring much higher frame rates in-game.

The 9800X3D comes fully unlocked, making overclocking a possibility, something which wasn't available on earlier 3D V-cache chips. That said, base performance is pretty stellar on its own, and there really isn't a more efficient gaming CPU on the market at this level.

You aren't having to juice for power here. It offers the best performance per watt of any gaming CPU on sale, besting newer upgrades like the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D. Our CPU benchmark data confirms that, showing that the FPS difference between the earlier AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and newer Ryzen 7 9850X3D sits at only 3% at 1080p. You're probably running your games at 1440p or 4K with a chip like this one, too, which will close the gap even further.

Pair the 9800X3D with a modern GPU, and you won't find too many bottlenecks from the CPU end. If you combine it with a top-class option like the RTX 5080 or RTX 5090, however, and it'll smash through anything. High frame rates, high resolutions, even in CPU-heavy games like Cyberpunk 2077. The 96MB of L3 cache will give you the performance upgrade you need to perform at any level.

Another bonus for the 9800X3D is its lifespan. This is a long-term CPU, with performance that sits near the top, and which is very much expected to continue to dominate gaming for years into the future. This is an AMD AM5 processor, too, and that's a platform that AMD has publicly committed to support for several years to come.

The £339.99 sale price for the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D makes it a must-buy if you're due for a CPU upgrade or you're planning a new build. While RAM and SSD prices have shot through the roof in recent months, this 9800X3D deal is an unmissable discount ahead of the Prime Day sales event, and one you'll want to grab quickly before the stock or discount runs dry.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

Most all you hear about "running an AI model" involves a GPU of some sort, but not every AI task is suited to that hardware. Smaller models or single-user latency-sensitive operations can benefit from running on the CPU instead, as it avoids the overhead of shuffling data to and from the GPU. There are also many situations where there is no GPU available to begin with, or it's a meek integrated affair with limited capabilities. Intel and AMD have recently released the full specification for the ACE CPU extensions that make it easier and more power-efficient to run the aforementioned AI tasks on x86 processors.

ACE comes in by offering a technical standard that leverages the existing AVX10 registers but adds silicon dedicated to matrix multiplication. This brings multiple benefits, but the key advantages are better power efficiency, easier development and optimization, and leveraging AVX's 512-bit inputs. The latter makes for easy integration with existing designs by eschewing the need for ACE-specific inputs.

Matrix multiplication is the cornerstone of AI workloads: take a table of numbers, and run a multiplication-addition loop over the whole thing. This has always been possible with most any CPU, though at limited speed. Even today, running these loops uses a lot of power, even when leveraging x86's AVX10 multiply-accumulate instructions — something that's technically a hack, as AVX wasn't designed with 2D matrix operations multiplication in mind.

For the same number of input vectors, ACE can perform 16x as many operations, compared to AVX10. Note this doesn't necessarily mean a 16x speedup, as that will depend on each individual implementation, but it's reasonable to expect that Intel and AMD will dedicate more silicon to this task in future designs to improve performance. Plus, as each ACE instruction performs more work than its equivalent AVX10 loop, there's less CPU instruction overhead and potentially better RAM bandwidth usage right off the bat.

The benefits go far beyond just using fewer instructions for the same thing. ACE is intended to be implementation-agnostic, meaning that ML frameworks and their underlying libraries (PyTorch, TensorFlow) can just write one code path instead of having multiple variations depending on the underlying hardware and its degree of AVX support.

ACE native supports most every data type used in ML operations (including but not limited to INT8, INT32, FP8, FP16, FP32, BF16), but it also can use Open Compute Project's MX block-scaled formats natively, something that AVX10 does not provide. Developers will also be able to move some NPU-specific workloads back to CPU when they need something done now and fast. In those situations, not having to deal with the fact that each NPU is different is a huge boon, too, as ACE offers a consistent target across x86 hardware.

AMD has told Tom's Hardware that it will reinstate Transparent Secure Memory Encryption (TSME) on desktop Ryzen 9000 processors in July (we have the full statement further below). The feature is branded as Memory Guard for AMD's Ryzen PRO lineup, but it's available on non-PRO CPUs, as well. Earlier this year, AMD quietly removed the feature with AGESA 1.2.7.0, which Ars Technica reported on earlier this week. AMD tells Tom's Hardware that it's bringing TSME back to non-PRO Ryzen 9000 chips "based on valuable community feedback."

TSME is a firmware-level encryption feature for memory. It allows the processor to generate a key in order to encrypt data stored in RAM, serving as a layer of protection against cold boot attacks, where a sudden shutdown can allow a physical attacker to extract sensitive data stored in memory.

According to the Ars Technica report, AMD confirmed TSME support on consumer CPUs as far back as 2020 with the Ryzen 7 3700X. The author of the story, Ben Kilpatrick, discovered TSME's removal after running a security audit on a new machine with the Ryzen 7 9700X. After discovering that TSME was no longer supported, Kilpatrick worked with MSI (his motherboard vendor) to confirm that TSME had previously been supported but was disabled in AGESA 1.2.7.0.

Following the discovery, Kilpatrick raised a bug report on AMD's GitHub repository, where Mario Limonciello, a senior principal software engineer at AMD, eventually responded: “My apologies, but I don’t have any more information to share on this topic."

Without any comment from AMD, it appeared as though the company disabled TSME through firmware on its consumer parts in order to differentiate its PRO lineup. TSME isn't a critical security feature for most consumer desktops, as it protects against attacks where the attacker needs physical access to the device. Still, if it was previously a capability, there's no reason TSME should be disabled through firmware.

Now, AMD has responded to Tom's Hardware with the following statement:

"We take the security of our customers’ data very seriously.

AMD Memory Guard (Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, or TSME) is a hardware-based memory encryption technology available on our Ryzen PRO desktop and mobile processors where supported in silicon. It is a foundational security feature, and we have no plans to remove support from our Ryzen PRO lineup. This commitment holds now and in the future.

Regarding certain non-PRO Ryzen 9000-series desktop processors, a BIOS option to enable Memory Guard was previously available but was removed in a recent update. Based on valuable community feedback, we will reinstate this option in an upcoming BIOS release in July."

We've already heard quite a lot about AMD's next-generation EPYC processors, code-named Venice, and we've heard a fair bit about the consumer Zen 6 parts, too, particularly in their Olympic Ridge and Medusa Point guises. Now, thanks to Budapest-based low-level programming enthusiast InstLatX64 (@InstLatX64 on X), we now have the first confirmed details about AMD's Zen 6-based Threadripper CPUs, code-named Mustang Peak. There's no shockers here, and there's not a ton of information to work from, but we can still do some interesting speculation.

The key details that we actually have confirmed are this: Zen 6-based Threadripper parts are internally codenamed "Mustang Peak," and they're going to use Core Complex Dies (CCDs) built on a 2nm-class process at TSMC. We can infer that it's almost assuredly using the same CCDs as Olympic Ridge and Venice, but more on that in a bit. We know that it's going to be based on DDR5 memory and PCI Express 6.0, and likely because of the latter, it's going to require a new platform, known as "TR6."

InstLatX64 found this information in AMD's technical documentation portal, which we unfortunately don't have access to, though you can clearly see the front page of the document above. That's most of the story right there, but there are, nevertheless, some pretty interesting details we can deduce from this information.

For starters, the core counts. AMD's Zen 6 processors are expected to use "Powderhorn" CCDs that raise the core count per chiplet from 8 cores to twelve. This raises the max number of CPU cores on a desktop Ryzen processor from 16 to 24, and it increases the potential max number of cores on a Threadripper Pro CPU from 96 to a whopping 144 cores. Furthermore, we can speculate that clock rates will likely increase considerably, as Zen 6 is said to be a design that aims for clock rates "significantly above" 6 GHz.

A chip with 288 hot-clocked full-power CPU threads is likely to draw massive power, but it's absolutely going to want monstrous memory bandwidth. How do we feed the beast? Not with DDR6, as that standard isn't even finished yet, despite the fact that LPDDR6 is a go. It's possible AMD may be increasing the channel count from 8, as it's known that EPYC Venice is increasing memory channels from 12 on Turin to fully sixteen 64-bit channels (a 1024-bit memory bus). In combination with second-generation MRDIMMs, that's going to give Venice some 1.6 TB/second memory bandwidth.

Could AMD add MRDIMM support to Threadripper? It's certainly possible. Threadripper has always been derived from EPYC technology, and it doesn't seem a stretch to think that the rank-interleaving RAM could solve the memory bandwidth struggle that high-end Mustang Peak chips are going to slam into in massively multi-core workloads. After all, you're not going to reach 12.8 GT/s (the transfer rate of second-generation MRDIMMs) through regular old EXPO overclocking.

Besides that, PCI Express 6.0 will deliver up to 256 GB/second bidirectionally (128GB/second unidirectionally) on a by-sixteen link, which should probably suffice for nearly any sort of device you care to plug into one of these machines. I almost wrote "PCs," but with 144 CPU cores and PCI Express 6.0, we're hardly in "personal computer" territory anymore. Indeed, it's clear that Mustang Peak is going to be an absolute monster when it eventually arrives next year, likely in mid-to-late 2027.

According to a report by Ars Technica, AMD has quietly stripped a critical security feature from its lower-end CPUs, leaving unaware users potentially vulnerable to physical attacks. Following a months-long investigation tracked on GitHub, Ben Kilpatrick confirmed that the Transparent Secure Memory Encryption (TSME) feature — which protects CPUs against physical exploits that siphon data from connected memory chips — was suddenly no longer available on AMD CPUs outside the company's Pro lineup.

As the exhaustive inquiry, which involved conversations with AMD engineers, board vendors, and other CPU users, was coming to a head, an AMD engineer abruptly cut discussions short, stating, "My apologies, but I don't have any more information to share on this topic." As of this report, AMD has neither officially acknowledged nor explained the disappearance of the security feature.

TSME is a protection feature that encrypts the data stored in memory, making it unusable to physical attackers. AMD initially added this feature to its high-end CPUs, then later extended it to lower-end CPUs. Eventually, the feature became a given, leaving lower-end chip users assured in its availability as part of the chip package. However, without prior notice, AMD appears to have scrapped the security feature in these processors.

According to the Ars report, the company's only official reaction to the matter — not counting the GitHub discussions — is an email response stating that TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies," notably the first time the company has publicly stated such a restriction, despite the feature having worked on consumer chips for years. However, it remains unclear whether the disappearance is an intentional policy decision by AMD to reserve TSME for Pro chips or an unintentional regression that was introduced in AGESA 1.2.7.0, a newer firmware release.

Another concerning aspect of the removal is that the feature's disappearance is completely undetectable on Windows machines and requires significant technical work to identify on Linux. That means the security feature was removed, leaving users unaware that anything had changed.

Kilpatrick, a self-described "privacy-conscious Linux hobbyist" who first reported the change, was installing a new operating system on his machine running a Ryzen 7 9700X from the Zen 5 architecture. To confirm that all his security protections were enabled, he ran Host Security ID (HSI), an auditing feature that evaluates a system's firmware and hardware security configurations. To his surprise, HSI reported that TSME was no longer supported — even though he had enabled it in his BIOS settings all along. The contradiction sent him searching for answers.

His first instinct was to reach out to MSI, his motherboard’s manufacturer, but the company didn't initially provide a definitive explanation. He also filed a bug report on AMD's public engineering GitHub repository, where two AMD engineers eventually responded: Tom Lendacky, an AMD fellow software engineer, and Mario Limonciello, an AMD senior principal software engineer.

Interestingly, neither engineer appeared to have a clear answer for why the feature had disappeared. Their advice was basically the same: disable and re-enable the option in the BIOS, and if that didn't work, take it up with the motherboard manufacturer, making it clear that people directly at AMD were just as in the dark as the user reporting it.

It was only after this that Kilpatrick pressed MSI harder, eventually convincing its engineers to run controlled tests. They found that consumer Ryzen chips had TSME enabled under an older firmware version but showed it as "not supported" under a newer one (AGESA 1.2.7.0), while Pro versions of the CPU supported the feature regardless of the firmware or motherboard used.

This leaves the big question of whether AMD deliberately restricted TSME to its Pro chips, or whether the change was an accidental regression — a firmware bug introduced in that newer AGESA version. Either way, the silicon appears to have been capable of running the feature. The difference is whether users are looking at a bug that AMD should fix or a quiet product-segmentation decision that AMD has not properly explained.

Kilpatrick took these MSI findings back to the AMD engineers and resumed the discussion six weeks later. MSI's product marketing team, he reported, had been told directly by AMD that TSME is exclusively supported on Pro series processors. He also relayed MSI's test results: an internal AGESA flag that controls whether TSME activates during boot returned FALSE on consumer chips regardless of the BIOS setting, but TRUE on Pro processors when the feature was enabled.

Kilpatrick then brought up something especially awkward. He reminded Lendacky of a comment that the engineer had made back in 2020, confirming that a Ryzen 3700X, a consumer CPU, “should support TSME.” In a later 2025 comment in the same discussion, Lendacky again recommended using TSME, while noting that the motherboard BIOS provider had to expose the option. So there it was, AMD's own engineer, years earlier, acknowledging the feature working on exactly the kind of lower-end chip now stripped of it, proving that Ryzen support was not some fantasy users invented.

After some more back-and-forth, Kilpatrick asked bluntly whether the flag being set to FALSE on consumer chips was a silicon-level limitation or a firmware policy decision — since one is permanent and the other is potentially reversible. Limonciello’s reply effectively closed the chapter. “My apologies, but I don’t have any more information to share on this topic,” he wrote.

To be fair to AMD, there is no clear indication that the company ever publicly advertised TSME as a consumer Ryzen feature. AMD has long said that a related memory protection, Secure Memory Encryption (SME), is available only in the Pro and EPYC CPU tiers. SME is OS-managed, using a single key and allowing the OS to selectively encrypt individual memory pages. TSME, by contrast, is firmware-managed, encrypting all RAM with no OS involvement. When active, it guards against physical attacks such as cold-boot exploits, DRAM interface snooping, and memory module removal, and it activates silently once enabled in the BIOS, making it the more practically useful of the two protections.

For now, AMD has said nothing official. It hasn't confirmed what happened, why it happened, whether anything actually changed, or what users of its consumer chips should now expect. Given the years of TSME quietly doing its job on these lower-cost processors — and the AMD engineers' supposed own past comments treating it as supported — users had every reason to regard it as part of the package.

For most consumer Ryzen users, the practical impact of the change is narrow. TSME protects against physical attacks, meaning scenarios in which someone has physical access to the machine or its memory hardware and attempts to extract secrets directly from RAM. The feature is more important for people carrying sensitive laptops, handling confidential work, relying on full-disk encryption, or operating in environments where seizure, theft, or hardware tampering is a realistic concern. Anyone who genuinely needs memory encryption on AMD hardware now appears to need a Ryzen Pro or EPYC system, unless AMD clarifies the situation or restores support.

We learned a lot about Intel’s upcoming plans for desktop CPUs at Computex 2026. In classic Intel fashion, we’ve already heard a lot about the company’s next-gen CPUs, codenamed Nova Lake, even while the recent Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs are still warm from the oven. But on the ground in Taipei, we heard not only more about Nova Lake and the Z990 platform it’s arriving on, but also how Intel intends to handle the rollout and how it will fill the gaps in its lineup with “Raptor Lake Next,” which is supposedly slated to launch next year.

Trade shows are the best opportunity to learn details about unreleased products before they show up in a press deck, and simultaneously the worst venue to do so. With jet-lagged representatives and reporters, thousands of people whizzing past, and the threat of Jensen Huang showing up to sign components and shut down a floor on a moment’s notice, it’s easy for things to get lost in the shuffle. So, we’re going to work through everything we learned about Intel’s upcoming plans in stages, starting with details that are confirmed, and working toward more speculative murmurs.

Intel has a fairly aggressive consumer roadmap, which the company itself would tell you – and the company told us as much at Computex, as a matter of fact. Both Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of client product management, and the recently joined Alex Katouzian, executive VP and GM of client, played up Intel’s roadmap to Tom’s Hardware, and for good reason.

Chronologically, Intel’s plans look something like this: We’ll see the first Nova Lake SKUs roll out at CES 2027. A few months later, we’ll see a refresh on the LGA 1700 socket with “Raptor Lake Next” CPUs, and come Computex next year, Intel will launch a 52-core flagship Nova Lake SKU. None of that is confirmed by Intel, and we have varying degrees of confidence in each step of the roadmap, so take it as speculation for now. We’ll dig more into the details we have and what’s simply rumored below.

What about AMD?

Before Intel, we should at least look at why we’re not talking about AMD’s next-gen desktop plans. Basically, we don’t have a ton of information on Zen 6 CPUs yet, and even less information about Olympic Ridge, the desktop consumer lineup of Zen 6 chips. Computex didn’t change that fact.

At Computex, AMD revealed the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, relaunched the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and brought the RX 9070 GRE to the rest of the world. Unlike previous years, AMD didn’t hold a keynote, where we might’ve seen a more concrete tease of Olympic Ridge; AMD has already teased Zen 6 broadly several times. Bigger Zen 6 news is likely at the company’s Advancing AI event next month.

Although AMD hasn’t said when Olympic Ridge will launch, we originally expected it in late 2026. Now, 2027 is very likely. AMD has shifted the Zen 6 conversation toward its EPYC Venice chips, and confirmed production ramp on Venice in May. Although AMD traditionally leads with a consumer launch at the turn of a new microarchitecture, it’s unlikely that Olympic Ridge will launch before Venice. Demand for CPUs is spiking in the data center for agentic AI workloads, after all, and AMD is adjusting accordingly.

Olympic Ridge probably isn’t top of mind right now, from both AMD itself and its partners. AMD laid the groundwork for a unified CPU architecture generations back, and Intel’s approach has been a bit more disparate across client and data center (although that’s been changing with releases like Xeon 6 and Xeon 6+). We don’t know when Olympic Ridge news will arrive, but it almost certainly follows far greater detail about Zen 6 in the context of Venice.

What’s confirmed

Let’s start with the concrete details about Intel’s future CPU plans. These are things we have direct evidence for, be it photos, our own hands-on time, or sources we’re extremely confident in. At least two Z990 motherboards were at Computex, a third is rumored, and we saw (and held) what looked to be a near-production model in a closed-door meeting. And from that, we can already tell a lot about Nova Lake.

First, the LGA 1954 socket, which has now been pictured (we were told not to take pictures, but someone else did the dirty work, it seems). It’s the same size as the LGA 1851 socket, measuring 45 mm x 37.5 mm, and it retains compatibility with existing coolers, which we were able to confirm at Computex. It features more pins, as the name reveals, and uses the 2L-ILM, or two-lever Independent Loading Mechanism. The picture of the socket circulating matches what we saw at Computex.

The motherboard we saw featured dual 8-pin EPS connectors, along with an 8-pin PCIe connector near the bottom of the board, which is said to provide auxiliary power to the CPU. We’ve seen a leaked photo of the Z990 PCH now, which is said to draw more power due to broader PCIe 5.0 support. The Z990 board we saw, at least, had three PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, along with three PCIe 5.0 expansion slots. Short of perhaps specialized designs with extra M.2 slots, we expect Z990 to support PCIe 5.0 across the board.

As for the chips themselves, all that is confirmed from Z990 motherboards is that Nova Lake can scale up to a high-end power design. We’ll speculate more on specific numbers later, but we’ve seen auxiliary power beyond two 8-pin EPS connectors on two Z990 motherboards now, and the motherboard we held had an extremely high-end VRM design; we can’t say more than that at this point.

An important caveat here is that we’re dealing with high-end motherboards and discussing how high the platform can scale, not how it will scale. Plenty of ink has been spilled about Nova Lake’s supposedly high power draw, but we really don’t have details about the chips themselves, rather just the tippy-top of the platform that will support them.

Outside of Z990 boards, Intel has confirmed that Nova Lake is “coming at the end of 2026.” That’s what CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at the company’s full-year 2025 earnings call back in January. What we were told by multiple vendors at Computex is Q1 2027, with a portion of those vendors specifically pointing to CES 2027. Similarly, with Z990 motherboards, some vendors said Q1 2027 while others said Q4 2026 (one even hinted at Q3). Believe it or not, these timelines actually all match up.

What’s lost in translation here is when the sale is happening. Before Nova Lake launches publicly, Intel and motherboard vendors will need to sell products into the channel, which, a few months later, will be available for sale at retailers for you to buy. What we’re likely looking at is sales into the channel in Q4, a public launch of Nova Lake at CES 2027, and retail sales in Q1. When Tan says Nova Lake is coming at the end of 2026 to a group of investors, he’s likely referring to selling into the channel, not the final retail sale.

What’s likely

Now, we’re getting into a bit more speculation. These are some of the details we heard about at Computex, or confirmations of previous rumors that we don’t have any concrete evidence for. Given the conversations we had at Computex, and a healthy dose of critical thinking, these are the details that are likely but not confirmed. There’s always a chance we’re just blind men touching an elephant on some of these points.

First, Nova Lake. For nearly a year now, it’s been rumored that the highest-end Nova Lake SKU will scale up to 52 cores. That’s the number we heard at Computex, as well, but not as a typical flagship. Rather, we heard that Intel plans to lead Nova Lake with a 28-core flagship, which will launch at CES 2027, and introduce a high-end 52-core model later in the year. The timeframe we heard was Computex 2027, but if anything is subject to change, it’s a release date that’s a year away. For now, let’s call it later in 2027.

The 52-core SKU will apparently come with 16 Coyote Cove P-cores, 32 Arctic Wolf E-cores, and a cluster of 4 LP-E cores; we didn’t hear that at Computex, nor anything to the contrary, but that’s what has been previously rumored. That model will reportedly come with two compute tiles, so the 28-core model with a single compute tile will likely look like an 8 + 16 + 4 split. That’s pure extrapolation at this point, however.

As for the 52-core model, we were told it comes with a PL1 of 175W and a PL4 of up to 700W. The PL1 number is what’s important here. Although that is a sizable increase over the 125W PL1 of both the 285K and 14900K, 52-core Nova Lake doesn’t sound like a direct replacement for those parts. Given the timing and extra power demands, it looks more like a spiritual successor to Intel Extreme Edition chips, targeting enthusiasts with deep pockets and the HEDT crowd.

Nova Lake is treaded ground at this point, however. Something new we learned about from Computex is “Raptor Lake Next.” After hearing the name, we asked Intel, which declined to comment on Raptor Lake Next at this time. Apparently, however, it will be the third refresh of Raptor Lake CPUs on the LGA 1700 socket, particularly targeting budget-conscious builders while Nova Lake satiates the enthusiast crowd.

There are some pieces of circumstantial evidence that point to a reintroduction of LGA 1700 CPUs. First, this has been previously rumored. In April, prolific leaker Jaykihn hinted at another Raptor Lake refresh coming in 2027. We’ve now heard that the range is called Raptor Lake Next from multiple sources, and it’s specifically coming in the first half of 2027, some months after the initial Nova Lake launch.

Additionally, multiple motherboard vendors told us that they’re ramping production of LGA 1700 motherboards, including DDR4 boards, though they didn’t say it was in relation to any new CPU releases. Intel itself has dropped a few hints, as well. Earlier in the year, Intel’s Robert Hallock said that Raptor Lake will be “abundantly available” in the market, and at Computex, Intel’s Nish Neelalojanan told Tom’s Hardware that Intel “will continue to make sure that there are products which can take care of older memory technologies.”

It would certainly make sense for Intel to refresh Raptor Lake a third time. Although data center demand is offsetting it, the decline in desktop sales from high memory prices hits Intel and AMD on the balance sheet as well. Just about everyone we spoke with at Computex talked about the state of memory prices, and Intel has a DDR4 platform that it’s still actively selling on the market. AMD, with a hard switch to DDR5 with Zen 4, has to reach back further to revitalize DDR4 options, but Intel already has a small ecosystem of DDR4 motherboards and CPUs available now, which it could easily bolster. We’ve heard that bolster is coming in the opening months of next year.

What that range looks like remains a mystery, however. It could be a proper refresh, or it could simply be an infusion of 14th-gen stock (and LGA 1700 motherboards) into the market along with new price points; both Raptor Lake generations have slowly crept up in price since the end of last year. The important thing here is that it seems Intel is targeting LGA 1700 for the lower end of the market, as Arrow Lake, with its underperformance and high price due to exclusively using DDR5, won’t provide the last-gen value bridge that previous generations have.

After Tom's Hardware originally broke the news about Raptor Lake Next, we followed up with Jaykihn, who provided a few specs.

*Naming unconfirmed by Intel, specifications rumored

The specs we've heard about are for the four SKUs above, which would comprise the main lineup of chips with integrated graphics enabled; apparently, Raptor Lake Next will include options with the iGPU disabled, as well as mobile chips. The final branding is unconfirmed, but we've heard that Intel intends to launch under the Core Ultra 200 name.

Out of the four SKUs, the 16-core Core 5 looks like Intel's breadwinner. Throughout 12th- to 14th-Gen, Intel topped out Core i5 models at 6 P-cores. You'd have to step up to a Core i7 for 8 P-cores. If these specs are correct, Intel is stepping down to an 8 P-core configuration a tier in branding, which will hopefully come with a cut to price.

What’s still up in the air

Some of the finer details of Nova Lake are still up in the air. That is, we don’t have any direct evidence for them, nor any corroboration from Computex. That’s not to say that the details here are false. Rather, we just need more information to say, for sure, that some of these details are a part of the Nova Lake lineup.

First and most obvious is bLLC, or big Last Level Cache. This is one of the earliest Nova Lake rumors that is still circulating, and for good reason. Intel hasn’t found an effective counter to AMD’s 3D V-Cache CPUs in more than four years. We’re closing in on half a decade where AMD has entirely owned the high-end of PC gaming, which has continually eaten away at Intel’s market share. bLCC is, apparently, Intel’s counter to 3D V-Cache, using its own Foveros 3D hybrid bonding to stack additional last-level cache.

Tom’s Hardware asked Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and a panel of executives at the company how it plans to address X3D CPUs, and Alex Katouzian, a 20-year Qualcomm veteran who recently joined Intel in a leadership role over the client group, said the following: “When I first came in and started reviewing road maps for the team, I was very pleasantly surprised. So, stay tuned, a very strong roadmap [is] coming, and we will be gunning for that section of the market as well. And so, please stay tuned.”

Context is important, but Katouzian is really only saying that Intel is gunning for high-end gamers with its roadmap, which, of course, it is. Otherwise, bLLC has entirely been a topic of the rumor mill. Intel has indirectly teased it with PR hits about its packaging capabilities, but that extends far beyond bLLC. Hybrid bonding, especially from a foundry perspective, has far greater legs in the data center.

Although Intel has the packaging and bonding capabilities, the scale of them for a mass-market product like Nova Lake is questionable. Intel would need to bond the SRAM to the logic tile with Forveros and package the chip with EMIB, creating the “EMIB 3.5D” combination that Intel has talked about previously. We first saw EMIB 3.5D on the Ponte Vecchio data center GPU, but most recently and relevantly on Clearwater Forest, Intel’s first foray into putting 18A in the data center. The capability is there, but if Intel can scale that up to a consumer range with more limited die space and higher per-core performance remains to be seen.

One advantage of Intel’s hybrid bonding and advanced packaging is that it can package dies from other foundries, not just those from Intel foundries. That brings us to the second finer point about Nova Lake, which is the node. Originally, the assumption was that Intel would use 18A for Nova Lake. We have 18A on mobile with Panther Lake, in the data center with Xeon 6+, but not on the desktop. Further, Intel has previously commented about reshoring its manufacturing for consumer chips after a brief stint with TSMC for logic tiles in both Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake.

Around this point last year, however, rumors started circulating that Intel is using TSMC’s N2 for Nova Lake. The source of the rumor is flimsy, however. Well-known reporter Charlie Demerjian of SemiAccurate reported in July 2025 that Intel taped out a major product. The report didn’t mention what product, what foundry, or even include “TSMC” anywhere on the page. Still, other outlets took the story, claiming that not only was Demerjian talking about Nova Lake, but also that he was talking about TSMC N2.

There are reasons Intel could use TSMC for the logic die. The company has reiterated that it’s shifting wafer capacity toward the data center, so if TSMC can fill additional capacity on the desktop, we could see TSMC on the main logic die. It’s also possible that TSMC is manufacturing other tiles on Nova Lake. Intel has consistently blended nodes in recent generations, so even if Intel were to confirm that it’s tapping TSMC for Nova Lake, that doesn’t necessarily mean the Taiwanese giant is manufacturing logic.

And, just as easily, Intel could absolutely be using TSMC for logic. That’s the point here; we really don’t know at this point, outside of vague reporting, getting swept up in the rumor mill, and taking on a life of its own. The Cinderella story for Intel would be Nova Lake on 18A, but given the struggles on 18A yields, it wouldn’t be surprising to see TSMC at the helm for Nova Lake once again.

Hurry up and wait

Intel needs a much more aggressive roadmap on the desktop than AMD, frankly, and that roadmap is starting to take shape. Although AMD and Intel compete on the finer points of performance, Team Red has almost exclusively taken market share away from Intel, quarter over quarter, for the past decade. There are only a handful of quarters in that time when AMD has lost market share, which it has always rebounded from in the quarter that follows.

Even if Intel still represents the majority of the desktop market — and it does based on the latest market research — the trend is abundantly clear. Add on top of that clear fumbles like Arrow Lake, and it’s obvious that AMD doesn’t need to move the needle much to continue swiping customers. Intel needs to make big moves to recover.

We should have more official details about those plans soon. Intel mostly sat Computex out on the consumer front, short of the Arc G3 range that, although exciting for gaming handhelds, is destined to be a niche product given the high prices of the devices those chips are going in.

For the past four years, Intel has held its Tech Tour event in the fall, taking the place of its previous Architecture Day, which took place in the late summer (most of those details have shifted to the Hot Chips conference in August). Intel has already told us that Hot Chips will have more details about Diamond Rapids, Intel’s next-gen P-core Xeons. That leaves Tech Tour for when we’ll likely get a full architectural deep dive on Nova Lake. Intel has yet to confirm Tech Tour 2026, but we have no reason to believe the company will sit out the rest of the year at this point. It also lines up with what we’re hearing about Nova Lake’s release — architectural details in the fall, a launch at CES 2027, and availability in Q1.

Regardless of when the exact dates fall, Computex made it clear that Intel is readying Nova Lake for a release soon. Multiple motherboard vendors brought Z990 motherboards to Computex and actively showed them to the press; I can’t imagine that was sanctioned by Intel.

As for Raptor Lake Next, Computex is the first quasi-confirmation we’ve heard of the range. That name apparently appears on Intel’s roadmap at some point in the first half of next year. With Nova Lake at the high-end and Raptor Lake Next in the midrange, Intel might have a one-two punch strategy to earn back some spots in the market, especially as AMD turns its Zen 6 focus toward the data center and prioritizes older architectures on desktop, given high DDR5 prices. Now, we just need to wait and see how those internal plans materialize as the rest of the year goes on.

We managed to grab pics of the newest upcoming server sockets from both AMD and Intel at Computex 2026. Both AMD and Intel are preparing to launch their next-generation server platforms that use all-new sockets, which enable new levels of performance, functionality, and power delivery.

AMD is a bit ahead with its SP7 platform in 2026, while Intel’s gargantuan 9324-pin socket will be used for Xeon ‘Diamond Rapids’ in 2027. While the platforms are entirely different, what makes them similar is the massive dimensions of CPU sockets and coolers.

AMD’s SP7 is the company’s next-generation socket that will support AMD’s 6^th Generation EPYC ‘Venice’ processors with up to 256 cores. The socket is huge and is rumored to support 16 DDR6 memory channels using 12.8 GT/s MRDIMMs as well as up to 96 PCIe 6.0 lanes (with the CXL protocol on top, though this is a processor, not a socket feature).

Based on information from Auras, the SP7 socket will be able to handle CPUs with a peak power consumption of up to 1,400W, so Auras and other companies are prepping liquid cooling solutions for these parts. In person, the socket is strikingly large, occupying most of my palm and overshadowing today’s server CPU packages.

Given the fact that the socket must support so many memory channels and PCIe lanes, it is not surprising that it is that large. Despite its enormous dimensions, the socket is still compact enough to enable dual-socket server designs, so AMD’s partners will be able to offer systems with up to 512 x86 cores as soon as its next-generation EPYC processors arrive later this year.

Meanwhile, for those systems that do not need so many cores and memory channels, AMD is prepping the SP8 platform that is set to offer fewer cores and DDR5 channels. Interestingly, Auras is working on water blocks for SP8 sockets as well, which means that the platform will still be quite mighty in terms of power consumption.

But while AMD’s SP7 is huge, Intel’s 9324-pin socket easily dwarfs it, as it is noticeably longer than the palm of my hand. The socket will work with Intel’s Xeon ‘Diamond Rapids’ processors with up to 192 cores, a 16-channel DDR5 memory subsystem supporting MRDIMMs, and PCIe Gen6 lanes.

Intel is yet to announce the processor base power of Diamond Rapids processors, though, since Auras is prepping water blocks for these CPUs, we're talking about circa 300W – 500W PBP and over 1 kW peak power consumption. Meanwhile, given that the socket is so massive, we would not be surprised if Intel’s 9324-pin socket will also support the Coral Rapids processors, presumably due in 2028 – 2029.

AMD on Monday announced that it had acquired MEXT, a startup that developed a memory tiering technology that makes NAND flash memory appear as DRAM to the operating system, which enables operators of data centers to save money on DRAM. AMD expects the acquisition to help customers improve system efficiency, lower operating costs, and deploy large-scale workloads more quickly.

As AI models continue to expand and datasets grow larger, memory availability has become an increasingly important factor affecting overall system performance. In many cases, memory resources, not CPUs or GPUs, are becoming a performance bottleneck. Meanwhile, in many cases DRAM is used inefficiently.

MEXT addresses memory efficiency challenges with an AI-based memory tiering technology that moves infrequently accessed data from expensive DRAM to NAND storage, which costs orders of magnitude less per unit of capacity, and in a way that's transparent to applications. MEXT's Predictive Memory Engine continuously analyzes memory access patterns and uses AI models to anticipate which data stored in flash will be needed next. Those memory pages are proactively transferred back into DRAM before applications request them and enable software to access data as though it were in main memory, thus preserving performance levels.

By increasing the amount of usable memory available to applications, MEXT's technology aims to improve utilization of existing infrastructure and at the same time reduce needs for expensive DRAM. This approach can potentially lower total cost of ownership for cloud providers and enterprise customers and enable larger workloads to run on existing hardware. AMD believes that these capabilities can benefit both traditional data center applications and modern AI deployments, where access to large memory pools is often critical for efficiency and scalability.

AMD plans to incorporate MEXT's technology into its data center product portfolio and expand its capabilities to address memory-hungry AI workloads. The company already offers integrated solutions that combine processors, accelerators, networking technologies, and software, so MEXT's Predictive Memory Engine will complement the already broad portfolio.

As an added bonus to the technology itself, AMD gains a team with expertise in memory architectures, infrastructure software, and large-scale computing systems. Terms of the deal are unknown.

Yesterday, we broke news of a third Raptor Lake refresh in the works from Intel, dubbed "Raptor Lake Next." Following that, new leaks have emerged from reliable tipster Jaykihn confirming the codename and detailing the upcoming family. Raptor Lake Next is slated for early 2027 and will land on the LGA 1700 socket as reported previously, but some outlets say it will also retain the existing Core 200 branding.

According to the rumors, Raptor Lake Next doesn't use Bartlett Lake silicon, which is Intel's special lineup for edge and embedded devices with only P-cores. That means a 12 P-core SKU has been ruled out for now, and that Raptor Lake Next will stick to the usual hybrid config. It's expected to scale across mobile and desktop with up to 125W parts and HX models as well, but it won't bring any new notable features.

Essentially, we're looking at rebranded 14th Gen CPUs that are likely being re-released because of their high yields. Intel spent a considerable amount of time and effort fixing the stability issues with 13th and 14th Gen families, so it makes sense the company wants to maximize its returns here. The Core-i9 14900K is still the most performant gaming CPU Intel has ever released, so calling this leftover silicon doesn't feel right either.

Jaykihn also provided further specs for the Raptor Lake Next, claiming it will only spread across Core 3, Core 5, and Core 7; no Core 9 SKUs in sight at the moment. At the top sits a Core 7 part with 8 P-cores and 12 E-cores, totaling out to 20 cores rated at 65W, same as the Core i7-14700. Then there's a 16-core 125W processor, which is identical to the Core i7-13700K, but it's counted as "Core 5" for Raptor Lake Next.

There's a special 10-core 65W part with 24MB of L3 cache because the previous 10-core silicon only had 20MB. It looks like the cache from disabled core clusters will still be accessible in certain Raptor Lake Next SKUs, and this might become a trend going forward. Lastly, we have a Core 3 CPU with 4 P-cores and no E-cores, running at 65W as well. Since all these chips are based on Raptor Lake silicon, they use Raptor Cove P-cores and Gracemont E-cores.

Keep in mind that RTL and RTL-R both came with Intel HD 700 series integrated graphics; the new Arc Xe architecture debuted with Arrow Lake on desktop. Nonetheless, Raptor Lake Next will work with DDR4 memory because it uses the LGA 1700 platform. That could help alleviate at least some of the burden of building a PC today as DDR5 RAM doesn't seem to be getting cheaper anytime soon.

Raptor Lake Next is apparently going into production in January 2027 so it could be available in Q1 2027, coexisting with Nova Lake as perhaps the value-focused option from the Blue Team. All rumors point toward Nova Lake being delayed to next year, but officially we still expect an announcement later this year. Regardless, the two families sure look like they'll overlap, which is why the Core 200 vs Core 400 distinction would be important for consumers.

Some of the most interesting topics at Computex happen around the announcements themselves, and that’s certainly the case when it comes to Intel’s plans beyond Nova Lake. At the event, Tom’s Hardware heard that Intel has plans to launch “Raptor Lake Next” CPUs within the first half of 2027. The CPUs would mark the third refresh of Intel’s Raptor Lake range, which first debuted with 13th-Gen chips. The chips will reportedly live alongside Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake range, which the company intends to introduce at CES next year.

We don’t know the proper name of the CPUs yet, just that they’re referred to as “Raptor Lake Next” and will arrive some months after the first Nova Lake chips have hit the market. At least two motherboard vendors confirmed to Tom’s Hardware plans to increase production of DDR4 motherboards, both for AM4 and LGA 1700, citing increased DDR4 demand. They did not comment on Raptor Lake Next.

At this time, we simply know the name and a rough timeline when the chips are set to release, which follows a rumor that circulated in April about Intel’s plans to re-introduce Raptor Lake CPUs, as well as comments from Intel’s Robert Hallock that Raptor Lake will be “abundantly available” in the market. At the moment, Raptor Lake Refresh still holds the distinction of being Intel’s best CPU for gaming, with the new Core Ultra 7 270K Plus just narrowly falling short of the Core i9-14900K in games.

The specifications remain a mystery, as well as what exactly the range will look like. Recently, Intel introduced Bartlett Lake for embedded and industrial applications, which use exclusively P-cores and slot into the LGA 1700 socket. The flagship Core 9 273PQE goes up to 12 P-cores, four more than the Core i9-14900K. Bartlett Lake chips are socket-compatible with Raptor Lake platforms, though not supported through software.

Nonetheless, some enthusiasts have managed to get Bartlett Lake chips working on consumer 600-series and 700-series motherboards. Although we don’t know if Bartlett Lake will make an appearance for consumer applications under a different name, the mere existence of the range confirms Intel continues to produce Raptor Cove-based wafers on Intel 7.

We’ve corroborated the name Raptor Lake Next, but we still don’t know if it will be an entirely new range of processors. AMD recently reintroduced the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, turning back to DDR4 amid memory shortages, and it makes sense for Intel to do the same. That could simply look like an infusion of stock into the market and new price points, however.

Keep in mind that plans can change. Although we’ve heard the name from multiple sources, as well as confirmed an LGA 1700 ramp with vendors, even small details can change weeks before launch. If, say, memory prices drop severely in the next few months, that would almost certainly change Intel’s plans. For now, however, this is the rollout we’ve heard about.

Intel declined to comment on Raptor Lake Next at this time.

Nvidia has told Chinese clients that its Arm-based Vera server CPUs could be available as soon as August and that orders can be placed now, Reuters reports, citing three sources familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, shipments of H200 AI GPUs to China remain frozen, months after CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia’s market share in the country had effectively fallen to zero.

This August timeline runs in sync with what was said at GTC Taipei during Computex, when Nvidia indicated that Vera systems would reach customers through system builders and cloud partners starting this fall. Telling Chinese buyers they can have silicon in August, during a global server CPU shortage, suggests they’re sitting near the front of the allocation queue for a product line Nvidia expects to generate $20 billion in revenue by the end of its fiscal year in late January.

According to the report, Chinese cloud companies are already testing more than 300 Vera servers, and at least one major cloud provider plans to place an order. Initial deployments will be restricted to those companies' overseas data centers, one of the sources said.

If this goes ahead, Vera will reach Chinese buyers where Nvidia’s GPUs can’t. Server CPUs face far lighter U.S. export restrictions than the accelerators that underpin Nvidia's data center business, and the company's recent history in China shows that Washington is no longer the only obstacle. The U.S. licensed roughly 10 Chinese firms to buy the H200, but not a single unit has been delivered because Chinese officials, intent on nurturing domestic chipmakers, withheld approval on their side.

That dynamic helps to explain why the deployment of Vera CPUs will be restricted to overseas data centers: Chinese cloud providers want the hardware, but putting U.S. silicon into domestic data centers will obviously invite scrutiny and potential action from Beijing officials.

Vera began life as the CPU half of the Vera Rubin superchip, first shown at last year’s GTC event. Nvidia broke it out as a standalone product at GTC San Jose this March, launching it alongside a rack design that packs in 256 liquid-cooled Vera CPUs and sustains more than 22,500 concurrent CPU environments. Then, at Computex, Nvidia said the chip had entered full production, claiming 1.8 times faster task completion than x86 processors on agentic workloads. Its predecessor, Grace, has shipped nearly 2.5 million units to date.

Meanwhile, server CPUs are being tightly squeezed by the shift of AI workloads from training toward inference and agentic execution. Agentic AI leans heavily on host processors for tool calls, code execution, and data handling, and CPU demand has outrun supply as a result of the agentic explosion.

Intel has quoted Chinese customers lead times of up to six months, while AMD has said that the global CPU market is tight, with demand outpacing its forecasts and supply constraints expected to persist.

AMD has shared the first official benchmarks for its forthcoming EPYC 'Venice' CPUs, which will be the first chips to use the Zen 6 architecture. The flagship 256-core model hasn't been detailed in full, but AMD claims it offers 3.3 times the performance of the Nvidia Vera CPU in a rack-scale implementation with a fixed power budget of 100kW.

The constraints of this test completely change the framing of the results, so it's worth highlighting them first. AMD is looking at performance from the level of a rack, not an individual component on a single socket. AMD's results are modeled around a 100kW deployment, showing the performance across the rack rather than the performance on a single socket, or even a dual-socket system.

AMD did not, however, actually test all of these deployments. There's a lot of modeling going on here, which AMD details in its methodology paper that was published alongside the results. First, AMD estimated power based on the processor TDP and additional components, and it used that to calculate the number of nodes (2P system for each node) within a 100kW power budget. Then, it multiplied that number of nodes by single-node performance measured in a handful of benchmarks.

That's just the start of the stipulations. AMD doesn't have its hands on Vera, so the performance here is an estimate. AMD took benchmarks it had for Nvidia's Grace chip and multiplied them by a scaling factor of 1.63x based on Vera results published by Phoronix. AMD also says that its 256-core EPYC Venice results are derived from an estimated 1.7x scaling factor over the EPYC 9965, along with "internal testing."

AMD's methodology ends with this line: "[These results] are intended to provide directional comparison rather than direct measured rack benchmarks." As you can tell from the three paragraphs of stipulations above, that sentence carries a lot of weight on its shoulders. You can't simply scale the performance of a single "node" (a dual-socket system, in this case) up in a linear fashion. Interconnects, as well as thermal and power limitations, will become a factor as you scale up.

Regardless, AMD frames the results here around agentic AI, though the benchmarks it's using are focused on general-purpose data center tasks. The topline result is from SPEC CPU 2017, specifically looking at integer throughput. AMD used the following benchmarks, as well:

• Server-side Java based on SPECjbb 2015
• WRK Tool for load on an NGINX web server
• Redis-benchmark for in-memory workloads
• Memory caching with Memcached
• Database performance with TPROC-C on MySQL

These "results" are mostly a way for AMD to fire back at Nvidia after Phoronix published a list of results for Vera that were curated by Nvidia. AMD is laying the groundwork for its Advancing AI event next month, where we expect to hear more about Venice, Zen 6 more broadly, and AMD's enterprise roadmap in much greater detail.

Intel is broadening support for its Binary Optimization Tool, or iBOT, with seven new games. Across the newly-supported titles, Intel claims an average performance jump of 12%, and increases as high as 27%. To unlock support for the new games, you'll need the latest Intel Platform Performance Package. Then, you'll be able to select the games under the Advanced tab in the Intel Application Optimization GUI.

We originally saw iBOT roll out with Arrow Lake Refresh chips like the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, but the feature works on Panther Lake chips, as well as Intel's latest HX mobile chips, Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus. Older Intel CPUs can't use iBOT due to hardware registers Intel must tap into for optimization. However, Intel says it plans on supporting the feature on future CPUs.

Intel initially rolled out iBOT with support for 12 games, which has now expanded to 19 titles. In our iBOT testing, we found that the feature offered an 8% average performance improvement, with the feature climbing as high as an 18% improvement in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Here are the games Intel added with the latest update:

• Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
• The Callisto Protocol
• Homeworld 3
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps
• Little Nightmares III
• Warframe
• Hollow Knight: Silksong

Across the seven new games, Intel claims an average performance improvement of 12% with the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. Intel tested at 1080p with High settings, and it used 32GB of DDR5-7200 memory and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090.

At the higher-end of the spectrum, Intel saw a 27% jump in Hollow Knight: Silksong and 16% improvement in Warframe. On the other end, Metro Exodus showed just a 2% uplift, while The Callisto Protocol jumped by 8%.

Intel's approach with iBOT might seem a bit scattershot, with 19 games now supported and no clear pattern between them. There are some popular and widely-played titles, such as Warframe and Cyberpunk 2077, but also less-demanding games like Silksong and older titles that don't see much play these games, like The Callisto Protocol. Even as the list expands, this strange mix is likely to stick around.

That's due to how iBOT works. It's essentially a translation layer, not dissimilar from Microsoft Prism. However, Intel isn't translating instructions from one ISA to another. Instead, it's optimizing x86 applications to ensure they're using the latest, most efficient instructions. Intel does this optimization with Hardware Profile-Guided Optimizations, or HWPGO, tapping into the silicon to see what's going on while code is executing. Once Intel has its optimizations, it packages them into a profile and ships.

Although iBOT is a unique feature, it's not universally applicable. Some games (and applications, as iBOT works outside of games) are already optimized enough that iBOT provides no benefit. We've also seen performance differences between chips, even between the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. It would be interesting to see how the feature works on more constrained chips, such as Panther Lake.

The AI revolution that shows no signs of stopping appears at times to have echoes of the gold rush. Whisper networks spread quickly through communities about new scarce commodities, and suddenly there’s a surge of interest as people snap up resources. For most of the ChatGPT era, you’ve struggled to get hold of a GPU for neither love nor money, with Nvidia practically able to manage its own waitlist, so great is the demand.

Much of the media’s attention – and plenty of investment – has been focused on the dash to grab as many GPUs as possible; most recently, memory has become a focal point.

But in recent weeks and months, there’s been a focus on ensuring that people have CPUs to match. For decades, the CPU has been the anonymous workhorse of the hardware stack, running operating systems, scheduling workloads, and keeping everything ticking over, rarely grabbing headlines unless there’s a supply crunch or a generational leap in performance.

Suddenly, it’s being talked about in the same breath as scarce-as-gold GPUs. What’s going on?

“AI deployment at scale has forced organizations to look at the infrastructure underneath the hype,” said Jason Beckett, chief technology officer in Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Hitachi Vantara, in comments to Tom’s Hardware Premium. As Beckett points out, while most of the attention is focused on GPUs because they run the AI models, the CPUs are vital because they handle “everything else”.

And as agentic AI becomes the norm, there’s a greater need for that CPU backbone to keep things running properly. “Always-on, multi-step reasoning systems don't create brief orchestration bursts around GPU workloads,” said Beckett. “They demand high-core-count CPUs running at sustained loads, continuously. The infrastructure requirement was always structural. It's just now unavoidable.”

Readjusting ratios

When data centers were previously being specced to deliver AI training and inference in the early days of the generative AI revolution, those building them accounted for a gargantuan bias in favor of GPUs. Chatbot conversations required between four and eight GPUs to every single CPU required, because the parallel equations required to meet user requests were GPU-inference heavy.

But as the main use case of AI changes from chatbots to agents, the requirements have also altered. A slight delay for in-depth inference while an AI model ‘thinks’ was seen as an acceptable interface choice. But as agentic AI requires rapid responses and the smooth coordination of tool calls and much more, latency can be a killer. Bolstering CPU counts can help avoid any problems that can quickly spin out into something more significant, breaking the entire agentic stack.

AMD, one of the major manufacturers of CPUs, has seen that shift first-hand. The company had previously forecast that the CPU market would grow at a rate of around 18% annually, but says that the change in requirements has materially changed the market. The rate of growth has now doubled to 35% a year, AMD claims, and will become a $120 billion market by the end of the decade.

“What AMD and Arm's results are telling us is that this is a structural, not cyclical requirement,” said Roger Cummings, CEO of PEAK:AIO, in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium. “In actuality, two structural shifts are driving the demand surge: the rise of agentic AI and the need for deterministic, predictable performance at rack scale.”

Much of that CPU demand is being driven by hyperscalers, who recognize the integral role that CPUs play in developing the AI clusters that are likely to power the economy in the years to come. “As GPU clusters scale, CPUs are taking on larger roles in orchestration, memory management, networking, storage coordination, and inference handling,” said Jeff Moore, vice president of strategic partnerships at Aegis Cooling, which specializes in next-gen liquid cooling solutions for AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium.

There’s a rise in CPU-to-GPU ratios inside AI deployments, said Moore, “particularly because distributed AI workloads generate significant demand for general-purpose compute, memory bandwidth, and east-west data movement.” A recent TrendForce analysis points out that CPUs’ contribution to latency – accounting for nearly 91% of all the delay in responses – is something that AI deployments are trying desperately to counteract.

Changing designs

That shift is now visible not just in financial forecasts, but in the physical design of AI infrastructure itself. In early generative AI deployments, racks were often built around dense GPU configurations, with CPUs effectively treated as supporting components – enough to keep the system running, but not a bottleneck concern. Things are shifting now. “In the media, an AI rack is pictured as a giant box of GPUs,” said Hommer Zhao, founder of OurPCB, a PCB manufacturer with more than 15 years’ experience, in comments to Tom’s Hardware Premium. “But from a hardware design perspective, a GPU is just a very fast, very dumb engine. It cannot talk to the internet or pull data from a hard drive.”

Rather than a single host CPU loosely paired with multiple GPUs, hyperscalers are deploying configurations with higher core-count CPUs, more memory channels, and, in some cases, multiple CPUs per node to keep pace with data movement demands.

There are also thermal and power considerations shaping how racks are populated. High-core-count CPUs, especially those optimized for cloud workloads, are being selected not just for raw performance but for efficiency under sustained load. In liquid-cooled environments, CPUs are increasingly part of the same thermal design envelope as GPUs, rather than an afterthought cooled separately with air.

Financial signs of success

Recent results from AMD and Arm reinforce the idea that this is not a short-term correction but a deeper architectural shift. AMD has reported strong growth in its data center CPU segment, driven in large part by hyperscaler demand for its EPYC processors, which offer high core counts and memory bandwidth well suited to AI orchestration tasks.

Arm, meanwhile, is benefiting from hyperscalers designing their own custom silicon. “Arm accounts for close to half of all compute shipped to top hyperscalers in 2025, with over a billion Neoverse cores deployed,” said Beckett. “Those are rack-level architectural decisions made years ago.” AWS’s Graviton, Google’s Axion, and Microsoft’s Cobalt chips all reflect a move toward CPU architectures tailored for specific workloads: high-throughput, energy-efficient, and tightly integrated with networking and storage. Arm’s licensing model positions it at the center of this trend, and its recent financial results highlight how significant that hyperscaler-driven demand has become.

Both sets of results point to a change in how CPUs are being valued. In traditional enterprise contexts, the hardware was often general-purpose and interchangeable. In hyperscaler environments, it’s becoming a specialized infrastructure component, tuned for specific roles within AI systems, whether orchestration, inference at the edge, or data preprocessing.

Taken together, the changes in rack design and vendor performance suggest that CPUs aren’t a secondary consideration in AI infrastructure planning any more. Instead, they are becoming a critical factor in determining overall system efficiency and cost.

“The spotlight hasn't revealed something new,” said Beckett. “It's just finally illuminating what serious infrastructure teams never stopped building on.”

Probably the most important processor in PC history was introduced on this day 48 years ago. June 8, 1978, marked the birth of the x86 architecture with the arrival of the 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU. This lineage continues to the majority of PCs today, almost half a century later. Ironically, this chip and its x86 architecture, the result of 18 months of R&D, was meant only as a stopgap because Intel’s complex, clean-sheet 32-bit iAPX 432 project was delayed.

The Intel 8086 was designed by a team of four engineers and 12 layout people led by Stephen P. Morse. Reports indicate that the impetus behind this project was to provide a practical, timely alternative to upcoming 16-bit Motorola and Zilog CPU designs. The fabled 8086 processor was only meant as a stopgap, as Intel had bitten off a bit more than it could chew with the iAPX 432 project, begun a year prior. As a side note, the 432 finally shipped in 1981 and was deemed too expensive, too complex, and fatally too slow when it arrived.

The 8086, the founding CPU in the x86 lineage, was marketed as Intel’s first 16-bit processor. It benefited from a degree of backwards compatibility with prior Intel 8-bit designs like the 8008, 8080, and 8085. Notable advancements over its predecessors included microcode for multiply and divide assembly language instructions.

Looking closer at the hardware tech specs, the Intel 8086 had around 20,000 transistors (29,277 including ROM and PLA) and was manufactured using Intel’s HMOS (High performance MOS) manufacturing process, originally developed for manufacturing fast static RAM products. The resulting 40-pin chip measured 33mm², and the minimum feature size was 3.2μm. Over its lifetime, it was released in clock speeds ranging from 5 to 10 MHz.

While the Intel 8086 founded the x86 architecture, the subsequent 8088 design (1979) would become the beating heart of the first IBM PC (1981) and that particular storied lineage.

Direct 8086 successors like the 80286, 80386, and 80486 would spearhead the Wintel alliance and establish the PC compatible as the default choice for productivity, home computing, and computer gaming enthusiasts until being sidelined by the Pentium CPU (also x86) from the mid-90s onwards.

Intel released its Core i7-8086K 40th anniversary chip in 2018. What next?

To celebrate 40 years since the original 8086, Intel launched the Core i7-8086K 40^th anniversary chip in 2018. It looks like a pretty safe bet that we should get another tribute in 2028, marking the half-century anniversary. What will we get for the 50^th? Something that embodies the fun and enthusiastic side of PCs, we hope.

Also, it will be interesting to see if Arm processors begin to impinge upon the dominant x86 designs from the likes of Intel and AMD in the Windows PC market in the next couple of years. We’ve had Windows-on-Arm efforts from Qualcomm and Mediatek try to usurp x86 with muted success.

At the recent Computex 2026 there was a lot of buzz about Nvidia’s RTX Spark Superchip, a powerful new Arm platform designed to transform Windows 11 into an agentic AI operating system. Looking back two years from now, will Nvidia and its partners have started to turn the tide against x86?

The Core i7-6700K was once one of Intel’s best CPUs for gaming, but fast forward to 2026, and the decade-old chip is now hardly an optimal choice to pair with any modern GPU hardware, including some entry-level graphics cards. Despite this, YouTuber TrashBench put the 6700K to the test and challenged himself to see if he could overcome CPU bottlenecking with an RTX 3080 purely through overclocking.

In his tests, the YouTuber pushed the Core i7-6700K to its absolute limit, exceeding safe voltage limits in an attempt to achieve his goal. Three overclocks were tested: a 4.7GHz overclock at 1.4v, a 5GHz overclock at 1.56v, and a 5.1GHz overclock at 1.65v. The YouTuber even attempted 5.2 GHz and 5.3 GHz overclocks with a vcore of 1.7 V, but sadly, neither attempt was successful. As for cooling, the 4.7GHz overclock was achieved with an air cooler, while the 5GHz and 5.1GHz overclocks were achieved using a custom loop submerged in an ice bath.

At stock speeds, the 6700K was barely able to get the RTX 3080 above 60% utilization in Cyberpunk 2077, with an average of 103 FPS. With the 4.7GHz overclock, the bottlenecking situation noticeably improved, with the RTX 3080 achieving nearly 70% utilization, resulting in 13% higher performance compared to stock. At 5GHz, the 6700K improved the RTX 3080’s utilization to 74%, with Cyberpunk 2077 performance improving by 17%. Finally, at 5.1GHz, the fastest overclock unfortunately yielded the least impressive result, improving performance by just 1 FPS compared to Cyberpunk 2077 running at 5GHz on the 6700K.

The YouTuber also tested several other games featuring Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hitman 3, and Far Cry 6. 3DMark Time Spy was also thrown in as a synthetic test. With air cooling at 4.7GHz, all of the aforementioned titles achieved an average performance gain of 7% compared to stock. In 3DMark Time Spy, the results were far different, with the 4.7GHz overclock achieving a whopping 19% performance improvement over stock. For the 5GHz ice-cooled results, performance improved by 11.3% on average over stock across the same three titles, and in 3DMark, the results showed a 24% improvement over stock.

The YouTuber unfortunately failed to achieve his goal of stopping CPU bottlenecking with a 6700K on an RTX 3080 through CPU overclocking alone. However, the overclocking results demonstrate that the Skylake flagship is still a capable gaming CPU, achieving around 100 FPS in all of the aforementioned games at 5 or 5.1GHz.

Valve released the Steam Hardware Survey for May 2026, revealing insight into PC gaming trends and patterns that define the industry. As always, we have data on how much RAM people have, what GPUs are the most popular, etc., but perhaps the most interesting bit of info is the CPU usage. AMD has now reached 46.06% share on Steam across all platforms, with almost 45% of Windows PCs using AMD processors.

The exact number for Windows is 44.97%, so we're counting that as 45% for AMD, while Intel is at 55.02% for the month of May. Compared to April, that's a 0.79% drop for the Blue Team, while also a 0.79% gain for the Red Team. Compared to the start of the year, in January, AMD only held 43.34% of the share while Intel accounted for 56.64%, so the patterns either way are being reinforced.

AMD keeps climbing the charts while Intel's lead is on a steady decline. It still has the biggest slice of the pie because of the sheer legacy left behind, and since AMD only became competitive in 2017. That was the year the first mainstream Ryzen chips came out and challenged Intel for the throne.

AMD planted the seeds of the Zen architecture during its darkest years, and that multi-year gamble has borne fruit to the point that the data now reflects it. To be clear, Intel is also very competitive these days, especially on the mobile front with Panther Lake and with the upcoming Nova Lake family set to take a true generational leap for desktop.

Most recently, the advent of 3D V-Cache has helped AMD secure the gaming segment with chips that consistently outperform other offerings. The company has released several X3D variants of its existing CPUs for both current and older generations, such as the newly announced 10th Anniversary Edition of the 5800X3D, the chip that started it all. On the other hand, we have the 9950X3D2 with extra cache stacked underneath both its 8-core CCDs for the first time in Ryzen history.

Funnily enough, AMD has also reached a similar 46% share of the server x86 CPU market thanks to its EPYC lineup, which is about to get refreshed with Venice this year and Verano in 2027. L

Intel is continuing to update its Core 200H series lineup based on Raptor Lake and has added product pages for the all-new Core 7 230H and Core 5 205H. These two new SKUs are identical clones the Core 7 240H and Core 5 210H, save for the iGPU which Intel has disabled from the factory. This makes the 230H and 205H the first CPUs in Intel’s Core 200H lineup to not have integrated graphics functionality.

The Core 7 230H comes with six P-cores, four E-cores, 5.2GHz max turbo frequency (on the P-cores), 24MB of L3 cache, and 45W base power rating. The Core 5 210H comes with four P-cores, four E-cores, max turbo frequency of 4.8GHz (on the P-cores), 12MB of L3 cache and 45W base power rating.

Despite their mobile-like nature, the Core 7 230H and Core 5 205H are inevitably geared towards small form factor systems and motherboard OEMs whose expertise is in integrating laptop chips with desktop form factor boards. The latter is a practice that has grown over the years for markets where the high power efficiency and beefy integrated GPUs of mobile chips are desired in a desktop-like form factor.

Various outlets have already uncovered the 230H and 205H being included in some new motherboard models from MaxSun. There is nothing stopping laptop makers from introducing these chips into laptops, specifically laptops with discrete GPUs, but having a functional iGPU in laptop devices is essential for prolonging battery life while doing non-graphically intensive workloads.

For the uninitiated, the Core 200H series debuted a few years ago as Intel’s budget CPU lineup that slots below its Core Ultra 200 series lineup. The Core 200 series is made up of CPU dies made from Intel’s older Raptor Lake Refresh architecture, and thus does not have any of the architectural enhancements that have been made on Intel’s newer Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and Arrow Lake architectures. Intel also has a 200U series featuring Raptor Lake parts with 15W power envelopes.

Intel just launched its Core 300 series of mobile CPUs, also known as Wildcat Lake, for the budget segment a couple of months ago. But rumors for a next-gen refresh are already surfacing, with the latest one claiming that it will be a noticeable upgrade. Reliable tipster Jaykihn has just suggested that the Wildcat Lake refresh due next year will move to an 8-core config, up from the 6-cores that Wildcat Lake has right now.

The post you can expand above says "4+0+4," in reference to a rumored Wildcat Lake Refresh chip with 4 P-cores, 0 E-cores, and 4 LP-E cores, totaling out to 8 cores. Wildcat Lake today also has 4 LP-E cores but only 2 P-cores, so we're looking at a doubling in this aspect, and that should translate to real-world performance improvements. Keep in mind that these are Cougar Cove P-cores along with Darkmont-based LP-E cores, borrowed from Panther Lake silicon.

After all, Wildcat Lake is essentially just a cost-efficient and downsized version of Panther Lake that has an infused, monolithic CPU+GPU tile instead of separate chiplets bonded together — both are manufactured using Intel's 18A process. Wildcat Lake is, therefore, branded as the "Core 300" series, with the "Ultra" moniker removed to specify its lower-end capabilities.

Just two days ago, a leak from the same insider claimed that a 6-core Nova Lake mobile part was cancelled because that slot would be better filled by the Wildcat Lake refresh instead. Intel likely didn't want the two to overlap, and now that we know about a potential 8-core config, it makes even more sense. Jaykihn also replied, saying that Wildcat Lake refresh will still have 2 Xe3 cores for integrated graphics.

In the replies to the post attached above, Videocardz separately claims the Wildcat Lake refresh would be part of the Core 400 series, but only for the Core 5 and Core 7 SKUs. The lowest-end Core 3 SKUs would still be branded as the Core 300 series, as they will not be getting refreshed. This could mean Intel is trying to target a more upscale audience with its Wildcat Lake refresh, while the cheapest parts remain unchanged.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon C is making a major play for the hottest laptop market in 2026: The ultra budget segment. But competition is stiff, with Apple's MacBook Neo and Intel Wildcat Lake Windows laptops offering strong performance and battery life in affordable packages - even with sky-high global memory prices.

We sat down with Qualcomm's SVP of compute and gaming, Kedar Kondap, and other Qualcomm representatives at Computex 2026 to hear how Snapdragon C fits into its existing product lineup, and how Qualcomm considers itself uniquely positioned to offer a comprehensive ecosystem of agentic AI devices and software.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm SVP of Compute and Gaming: Our journey was not about solving what has happened in the past 30 years of PC innovation, but solving what's coming next in PCs. A lot of the innovation that has happened, we've obviously proved to the market that we're exceeding performance. We focused on three big metrics all along the way. One was leading with performance and making sure that we have leading performance in all of our silicon. We want to make sure we lead with power. Obviously, that used to be something super critical across the board, even as we start looking at newer generation of devices, and third, as you look at AI as a key metric.

When you think about the keynote today, and what we talked, what I shall talk about, as we enter this agentic world, it is more and more important. Each of these things play a very important role, whether it's performance, whether it's power, or whether it's AI, and the ability to run these intelligently. Right from whether it is a very small device, all the way to the data center. You saw how we're innovating, and the PC is no different. So we launched our X series processors, we extended that to the X Elite, the X Plus, and the X family. We launched the X2 Plus, we launched the X2 Elite, and the X2 Elite Extreme, and we wanted to make sure our intent was very simple: we wanted to make sure that the experiences we offer are available to all the consumers at every price point that we could address. What we introduced yesterday is a new class of platforms, the Snapdragon C. Our intent with that is to address platforms in lower price points that we can go and make sure that we can deliver the same performance pillar, the same battery life pillar, as well as provide AI functionality to all the consumers at price points that were never heard of.

So with that, we wanted to make sure that we have a full stack of products, we are addressing the needs of what consumers want. Consumers want the best performance, the best battery life, and as we enter this world of agentic beta, we want to make sure that across different devices, we're addressing all of these price points. So, we’re excited to be here, and I know there's a little bit of a longer introduction, but I want to make sure you have the perspective of where we come from.

Journalist 1: Thanks, Kadar. Nicole. You were just on stage with Advantech. Can you get us a little background on your announcements and what was said on stage?

Qualcomm Representative: Advantech has been a great partner of ours. I've done more recently the industrial business for Qualcomm, and so, you know, for us to get into this new area, and industrial is actually changing very rapidly. We are starting to see AI enter into the operation, advantage has been here in this space for a number of years, and so we announced a variety of different products to them over the last couple of years. Great to actually be at their keynote. We also announced yesterday [unintelligible] robotics reference design, which is something that is a new area for us. We've been partnered with Advantech for a number of years in this space, but the robotic session design will be a humanoid focus session.

Journalist 2: I'm wondering, Nvidia, a few hours ago, announced they were entering PC market. You guys have had it yourselves for the last two years. How are you thinking about how others come into [unintelligible].

Kedar: Welcome to the family [laughs]. We are, you know, we're excited when you think about the investments that we've made over the last several years, it's a good endorsement to the fact that there is an ecosystem that's growing outside of x86. We invested early on, we invested many years ago, with right from whether it is driving the ecosystem, driving the entire platform story. Whether it is getting the printers to work, whether it's getting the software apps to be compatible, whether it is getting the docs and peripherals to work, whether it's getting more than 2500 games to be compatible with Snapdragon, we led the way in driving that ecosystem, and I think this is positive tailwinds for the entire ecosystem. They'll tell us how we're all taking the ball forward in the trajectory that we started.

Journalist 3: This is for Nichole. She's had remarkable success in automotive and moving into robotics. Is there anything you’ve learned [unintelligible].

Qualcomm Representative: We’re learned a lot from automotive. I think AI at the edge with robotics is a really fascinating space, because you are starting to see this transition where you start to apply AI to start off with an unskilled worker, gradually start to go build up on level of skills, and ultimately start to get to something great. A lot of the underlying capability is similar to what we saw in the early days of automotive, especially the mobility part is quite similar. That will scale very quickly. We will start to see coarse dexterity, so that it's essentially transportation of goods, et cetera. That will happen over the next couple of years, and then the more complex final precision tasks will take more time.

But we are betting across the board, we are betting on models, we are betting on full embodiments. You'll hear more about this tomorrow. We're betting on a variety of different form factors with arms as well. We are also starting to look at what we can do in the end effector space, so we have a lot of technology around precision for the actual and effect of the arms, the actual digits, and what it is. What I like about robotics, which is quite different from the car, is that within the same embodiment, you have to have a lot of different technologies that cooperate, and that is something that we have a lot of capabilities. Lot more to come, but I think super interesting.

Journalist 4: When I was at the keynote from Jensen Huang, I was surprised when he mentioned the RTX Spark platform will support every Windows software ever written, and you suffered from Windows software in running on ARM. So, could you comment on that? And another question, if you could maybe share some more details about Snapdragon C platform, especially the TOPS. I saw a model from Asus, but it was behind in the glass box, and they didn’t have a lot to say of interest in that matter.

[Jensen Huang] mentioned that they will do an announcement tomorrow with Microsoft about the RTX Spark, and he mentioned that every Windows software that has ever been written will run on their platform, and this is not true for your platform, and probably for any Windows on ARM platform right now. So, I'm wondering if you want to comment on that.

Kedar Kondap: I don't want to speculate, but I'll tell you, our partnership with Microsoft has obviously gone several years in the past. We worked with them very closely. We launched the first Copilot class pieces together. We launched the first platforms where Microsoft OS supported it, and supported how these distributed computing work across a different course. So maybe once we start getting more information, we can, but I think I'm sure the engagement of Microsoft is strong enough where we work with them to build this entire ecosystem to make sure that it's compatible with Snapdragon and the architecture, so maybe once we get more information and get more, we can look at it.

The second question on Snapdragon C, so we haven't yet given out the specs for the products, but I'll tell you how I think about Snapdragon C. We wanted to, our OEMs are very anxious to bring this product to market, as is Qualcomm. There is, as we all know, there is a memory supply challenge in the market, and I've heard there's a storage supply that's also challenged, and we wanted to make sure that we have an offering where we can address a lot of price points that we've never addressed before, so think price points below what Snapdragon X has offered in the past. Snapdragon X will give you its relatable, you know, it's great platforms that get 599 today, some of them that hit 500 and above the X plus goes above and X Elite goes above that, so think it's a tier below what we can offer with Snapdragon X, and so our intent with that is to drive the same level of capabilities, obviously scaled to that tier, and what I'll tell you, it's just like the way we've exceeded expectations in launching specs of our products in the X series family of products. You should expect that the C in its class of products will lead its way, but we'll obviously give out specs for you.

Journalist 5: I've got a question regarding [Qualcomm’s] vision on how the tokens in a car, in a PC, in a smartphone and adapts and talk to each other. Cristiano said that we're going to need zillions of tokens, and they're going to be orchestrated. It means different parts going to generate the token, where it's relevant. Okay, like latency, horsepower. How do you gonna orchestrate them with your industry? Are you planning to build a software ledger, SDKs, or building a patented or open system? How do you plan in this vision to open everyone with a heterogeneous chip market, it's going to be difficult to make everyone work.

Qualcomm Representative: So I think it will vary by the ecosystem, but yeah, we will certainly build orchestrate the [unintelligible] where it does make sense. I'll give you an example of a car. We had already seen in the car a tremendous amount of content. You don't actually need, you can't even expect in many cases to be running models that all just have to go back to the cloud, just because of networking latency. So we have deployed already earlier this year 30 million parameter models in car. It depends upon what the types of use cases you're trying to run, but then if you think about this in the context of splitting search versus what it is that you're trying to run locally within the vehicle that is happening today. I think this starts to get more and more sophisticated as you start to define what is the use of the model at the edge.

So, with industrial, for example, we are starting to see already VMA is getting deployed in cameras when you have evidence at the edge, where you can annotate at the edge, send it out to cloud as an input, so it's going to depend quite a bit on which the ecosystem that you're trying to run your account. If you look at use cases like polling, if you look at use cases like search, those are probably obviously much more in consumer and enterprise nets, which should have different network orchestration, probably much more controlled by traditional ecosystems. An orchestrator is going to be a fairly standard offering as well.

Kedar Kondap: Aiden. I'm going to add a little bit more context also to what we'll just say, you know, the way you should think about how we think about overall income advantage, it's going to be the context awareness that you get across the various devices, and think of a personal knowledge graph that you build in the examples that he showed, right from whether you're wearing an XR glasses. We are able to connect. You can see what you see, you hear what you hear. You can have context awareness of what the user is doing. It's going to listen to what information you talk to when you're, say, at the doctor's office. You understand exactly when your next appointment is.

The ability for it to abstract all of this information, transfer that knowledge graph agentically into your calendar, into what your daily routine is, be able to take your personal information, whether it's talking about your healthcare routine. The goal that we see is first is to bring all of this orchestration together, and Qualcomm is uniquely positioned, as you can tell, right from whether it's a small physical personal device, whether it's a ring, or whether it's an XR glass, all the way from phones to PCs to automotive to robotics and data centers, we feel like we're in a unique position like one another.

Second, on the question about running stuff on device, now we've always said the world in the last two years. You know, I remember when we launched Snapdragon X Elite. We said with a lot of pride that, oh, we can run 30 billion parameter models. You know, today, fast forward that conversation, we showed 20 30 billion parameter models running on the C Snapdragon X platform. So, models have evolved. I can, what I could do earlier with, you know, accuracy of quantization and stuff, I can do a lot more than I couldn't do in the past. So the industry is evolving, where we're innovating, we're adding more capabilities to each of these devices on-prem, I'll say, or physically on device. At the same time, we know that the token economics, as Krishna showed, everybody in the industry see it?

So, if any of you use, if you have a poster subscription towards AI, you know you run out of tokens very quickly, and there is the fatigue is real, the fatigue on the side of a consumer, the fatigue on the side of the model. You cannot have both of those, the balance doesn't exist today, so the way we see it is one, you can connect all these orchestrations across the devices, same, you can orchestrate on what runs locally on the device, and of course we believe some of it will go in the cloud, and that hybrid orchestration is where we believe the industry is going, so build the knowledge graph across devices, run what you can locally on the device, if not, if the model is large enough, it will go to the cloud, and this whole equation will evolve over time as models start to become smaller, as they start getting quantized accuracies to be better.

What was, like I said, a 30 billion parameter running on a Snapdragon X, I can already run 30 billion parameters models quantized with very good accuracy. So that's how what we mean by this industry and ecosystem is going to change.

Journalist 6: I would like to touch on Snapdragon C again. You expect the platform to be a regional-specific solution, like for emerging markets, for example, and Qualcomm has great experiences in markets like India, for example, where do you expect it to be a global platform? And I'd like to touch on the NPU as well. Previously, every Snapdragon X platform, at least, had an NPU that OEM Certified Assistance for Copilot Plus seems to be the first solution where you sort of loosen your own set of requirements for a Snapdragon compute platform, and what led you to that decision?

Kedar Kondap: So, Nicholas, first I'll answer your first question, which is: it is a global platform. You will see this device launch globally. You know, for us it's there's a large stamp, as you know, in this particular segment. Lot of consumers that use PCs that sit in, I'll say, below the $500 price point. So, we have a large stamp that we can address there. The TAM [Total Addressable Market], as you know, is naturally biased towards emerging markets. So, from that perspective, yes, the focus, you'll see the platforms launch in many of the emerging markets, as well as developed markets. The TAM is much reduced in that, so it's just a function of the definition of where the time sits.

Your second question around NPU, no the platform does have an NPU, we just haven't talked about the sizing, but as you can tell, the silicon economics, we're sizing everything with the capabilities to be able to run use cases synchronously with the price point that we're addressing. So, think of it as you'll still be able to run, get a lot of the capabilities, you'll still be able to run a lot of use cases we talked about, while preserving the performance and battery life goodness that we bring with the Snapdragon product, so you'll see something very similar.

Journalist 7: There's been a lot of good questions on Snapdragon C, but if you're not competing with Neo, what specific product lines of products are you competing kind of in that below $500 price range?

Kedar Kondap: You know, you already heard a couple of our OEM partners talk about devices. I think Asus talked about the device. I want to make sure I don't jump the gun with the excitement that our partners want to launch it, but I think Asus has already announced. We've also addressed the fact that Lenovo, as well as HP, we announced with HP. Just want to give out somebody's information. We've announced with the OEMs, it will sit as I said, you know, Snapdragon X sits at around 599 type products, and it competes, as you know, better than what you can get with Neo and performance insights.

This gets the price points that it would be below 500, obviously. Now, the thing I always have to caveat is the memory and storage prices. I never know what it's going to do to devise price points, but that's how the platform is positioned. Think of it as small core competing products, but you know I'm nervous to say that, because it's going to be so much better than what existed in the market, so that's why I don't want to tell you that it's compete against that, because it's a different class, it's going to be a lot better than what's what you're used to seeing in market,

Journalist 8: Sorry to ambush you with another Nvidia question, as I know you already said you didn't see the announcement. They are going after a market that you guys have historically not went after, I think a few years ago you publicly said this is just not our wheelhouse, so are you guys planning to compete with what Nvidia is doing now, and if so, how?

Kedar: Like I said, I haven't seen this. I don't know what they've announced, but at the end of the day, look, we've come a long way from where we started. We go a couple years back, what we said, Rich, was we have the legacy, we have the technology in even things such as gaming. We come from, as you know, we have a very strong game studio house. We work with all the game engine guys to work with the net engine guys. We work with the studios on the mobile side and other platforms that we work with, but we bring all of the games to Snapdragon. Since we launched Snapdragon X in less than 24 months, we've done a lot of games that work with Snapdragon effectively go from 1300 to more than 2500, 2600. So I think what we've mentioned in the past is not that we couldn't support it, what we've said is we want to carefully not position this as a gaming laptop, right? The gamers who think of launching this as a AAA game-based laptop is not what we want to position.

We don't want to create confusion with what we're addressing, but from a technical perspective, nothing prevents us from addressing a lot of that, because, as you know, even when you think about creators, we've talked about our partnership, and what we've done with Adobe, what we've done with Black Magic, and others. So, we've already showcased that the entire creative industry is something that we support. We sold multiple use cases, so it's the entire ecosystem that already we've been addressing. So, like I said, I'm assuming that their introducing their platforms in market today is tailwinds for what the ecosystem will see as a strong showcase of non-x86 architecture.

Journalist 9: On the question of the Snapdragon C, somebody spoke about the emerging markets. One of the things which has happened in those emerging markets that arise on the tablet usage. So in the past three years, four years post pandemic, you can say that many of the people are buying who are stuck between a rock and a hard place, that you know, laptops are slightly expensive, they have a full use case of the productivity of a laptop, but they wanted a slightly bigger screen, so they are buying with sliders and the keyboard, especially the emerging markets. So, I just want to ask you, is your target that consumer, and do many of those cohorts is parents buying for the kids or education market, private or public, both? And the public market, you know, you know some of the PC loans, they've really done well, and they are restricted that success in the past year or so in education and some of those emerging markets, because the price points are creeping up now. So I just wanted to double click on that. Who is that target consumer in those emerging markets where we expect the volume to come from?

Kedar Kondap: So, as you know, we already play in a very strong manner with the Android tablets in all of those ecosystems, we have very strong partnerships across almost all the OEMs that you can think about. We have Samsung, OV, WOSU, Lenovo. We have all of these tablets that have launched. There are specific tablets I've launched that are focused on gaming all the way to productivity, all the way to education. So we have very strong portfolio products launched even in emerging markets with our partners.

With Snapdragon C, I can see a market out there, as you correctly pointed out, education being a very strong segment would address all of that. So, if you saw the press release that we talked about, which Snapdragon C we specifically call out that we will be in the education space. We are doing a bunch of pilot programs with our partners to go and address that. I wouldn't necessarily say that it's going to replace Android tablets, necessarily. I think hard to call whether that ecosystem is going to move away from Android to Windows, but right now they coexist pretty well. Like, there's a good TAM that's available for Android tablets with a stylus, as you correctly pointed out, as well as a TAM with Windows PC, and I think with this particular one, for now we'll be launching the Windows segment.

Journalist 10: Can I talk about we just launched, like Qualcomm with Asus A16? Will you deepen with Taiwan cooperation?

Kedar Kondap: I can't tell you how grateful I am for the partnership with the entire Taiwan ecosystem. The partnership goes obviously deep partnership with the ASUS, and we're grateful for the partnership with ASUS, brings a lot of innovation and market. If you've seen, if you haven't already played around with it, or if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to look at the A16 device with the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme product. It's a beautiful, thin, light laptop with significant hours of battery life, so it's a, it's a beautiful laptop, and that's because Asus brings a lot of innovation. You heard yesterday from Acer with the Snapdragon C platform that they're launching, but it goes beyond just the OEM partnership for us here in Taiwan, right?

We work very closely with all the BIOS guys, whether you know all the IBDs, we work with the inside, we work with AI devotees, we work with all the partners there, we work with all of the EC manufacturers, we work with ecosystems, so it's not just one cookware, we work with the camera sensors. So we do a standard ecosystem partnership summit here in Taiwan, the offense is just because innovation is going to happen here, and I think what you hear, even as I speak on Wednesday, is as we talk about what we try to throw the vision of moving to agenting, it's going to need a lot of innovation, that innovation is going to change the way the PCs are going to look, is going to change the edge appliance market, is going to change, because now you're going to be running these hybrid models, running and stuff, and we really believe that Taiwan is the hub for driving innovation, and, like I said, we're very grateful for the partnership that we've had with this ecosystem for the last many years.

Journalist 11: Looking towards the intelligent orchestrator for managing workloads. Do you see a primary device managing the personal AI agents? Would it be a smartphone, a transportable puck, a locally hosted cloud instance, for example?

Qualcomm Representative: I think the orchestrator is actually going to be associated with the user, so it's going to be a personal orchestrator, and the devices will evolve along that orchestrator. I think it depends upon the specific ecosystem that you refer to. So, let me pick an ecosystem that may be different from a personal device that is owned by an Apple or Google system. There are several ecosystems where the personal draft, for example, is specific to the enterprise that would like to own that specific data. It could be within an industrial environment, it could be something that requires the data to be resident within the premise owned by that specific enterprise.

In those environments, it really just comes down to what is the type of data that is being exchanged, whether it is data at the edge, data that is network specific, that is manipulated, that is interacting by the specific data. As you start to think about this in the context of the enterprise, I think, depending upon the type of data that this might be, so if it's a personal device like a camera or my glasses, then it starts to move towards the context within the data, there will be changes in the interaction, so for example, today if you think about enterprise data that is sitting on your laptop, that is part of your email, that is part of your SharePoint. How does that interact with the personal devices that you have? Those are things that, in my mind, are still going to get sorted through, but you're going to start to see the personal graph nature move more and more towards the user itself as a personal device.

We believe that the cross-device, as I said earlier, is what will play a super important role. The context awareness from the agent having access to your personal information and bringing that context to information from one device to another, and being able to drive that continuum, is what's going to differentiate more common. We feel we're in a very unique position to be able to go from pocket all the way to the cloud in driving that entire ecosystem.

Journalist 12: I have a question about the economics of the new world you mentioned already, the memory crisis, the skyrocketing memory crisis. I would like to know what impact you expect of the rising memory prices on the development of these agents in future on the consumer side, enterprise side, but also maybe on the other platform side.

Kedar Kondap: I think let's separate out two different things. One is we've all people that have been in this industry long enough to know the sequential nature of what happens with memory. Of course, this time is an anomaly in terms of what we're all seeing. I respect that, but at the same time, we know that eventually the supply chain economics balance out with that, right?

Like, over time, it may not come to the same levels as what we've seen in the past, because this is obviously a super cycle in terms of memory that we've never seen before, largely because of the needs of what AI, what the ecosystem needs. At the same time, though the token economic problem is a real problem, which is you as a consumer you want to be able to use more AI and you want to be able to be more efficient with what you're trying to do, but you're there's only so much in terms of affordability, same thing on the enterprise side, all of what you think about op-ex moving to capex, you have to be able to have that migration happen where you see your op-ex that you invested in and you're going to start moving to capex, or you're going to start getting every employee is going to get multiple models and drive that efficiency that you can get as an enterprise that you want, that migration is going to happen once you move to the other side.

With that migration, the entire equation of economics changes. Why? Because now, if I'm an enterprise, I know that running stuff on device… I'll give you an example, if I can now start running 5070 100 billion parameter models locally on prem, whether the device is a laptop, whether it's a 5 billion parameter model that runs on a phone, or whether it's an edge of line that sits in my desk running a 50-100 billion parameter model, or it's an influencing card that sits in on-prem, I know that the token economics dramatically changed, but I also know that as an enterprise to be able to run trillion parameter models, I'm going to go to the cloud, but I know I need to invest to be able to run on device.

So this balance of equation is what's important, and we feel like this is where we've always said the world is going to go hybrid, we've always said it's not once you're done with training in the cloud, it's going to start moving to the edge with your inferencing, and we feel very good about the position we're in, because that's where we've been investing for the last several years to drive this on device as well as hybrid approach.

Journalist 13: While wireless transition is a very big effort [unintelligible] has put a lot of time in those transitions and a strong focus, you almost single-handed move the industry to the next level, and that Qualcomm changed a lot, now it's more, much more diversified. So, my question is, is Qualcomm from today able to have the same focus on the safety transition in the future, or it may be more help from the industry?

Qualcomm Representative: We are wireless company first, so yes, we have a lot of focus on safety. I think wireless is in the DNA of the company, and wireless is really part and parcel of everything that we do. I mean, if you think about the complexity of building a cell phone, then there is a reason why very few companies are successful with these things. I think the 6G transition, maybe just to speak with 6G, is a very interesting transition, because we believe that the networks are going to actually become very intelligent in 6G, you'll be able to get a sense of creating a virtual digital trend of environments around you. It will bring telcos into the fore in terms of being able to get a much better sense of the physical world. It's a major area of work for us, and these G transitions take a decade, right? So you know that it took a decade for us to be develop 5G.

Journalist 14: Kedar, you answered a couple questions already on the personal graph and that comment about the agent moving closer to the user. I get the point that Qualcomm spans across multiple devices, and that they're, you know, that you're at a unique advantage because of that. But can you take us through how that would be architected? I guess inevitably, if it's spanning across devices, cloud has to be involved in this process, right?

Kedar Kondap: I think Brian, the way you should think about it is, first, we know that the entire ecosystem is fragmented, and we believe that as different hyperscalers, as different model providers, as different OS vendors, as different silicon vendors, all of these need to come together. We were not giving out much information today on what we're doing there, but as you can tell, what we are trying to indicate to the industry is today we have the ability to thread all of these things together, and we're uniquely positioned on how we want to do this over the next several months. We will come out more with respect to how we want to be able to tie these together, but the industry challenge that you highlight, and that's why we feel like we're at the center of driving innovation across this to bring this industry along to try something that's innovative.

Journalist 15: I'm going to be one of those guys who brings it back to the ARM thing. I'm just going to read you what Jensen said in his keynote, because I think I'm just going to read it deadpan. “This computer literally runs everything the world has ever created, and it runs agents.” So I don't know if that's true, but I kind of wanted to give it to you, and kind of hear, what are you guys working on in terms of like compatibility, or even emulation, because we've seen a lot of interesting ARM-based emulation coming from like open source places, so is there anything you guys are working on in terms of compatibility that is trying to push things forward?

Qualcomm Representative: I don't know how to use a broad statement like this to give you a full answer, but I'll tell you what we'll do today. There's about the last night track with my team, was we were worried about 50 claws that are available in my team, and from a snap back in perspective, X series perspective, these are run on the device, I think Krishna showed a bunch of these, a bunch of claws that he showed on stage, so you should imagine that we're, we've been leading the industry with driving agentic AI and orchestration on the PC for the last couple years.

So a lot of these models already exist, a lot of these claws run very effectively on Snapdragon, the models are running effectively on Snapdragon, so you should just assume right now that we've shown you the data that we're already dealing with industry with tight innovation.

Journalist 16: Do you see robotics requiring the two layers of intelligence like with autonomous vehicles, or will the user interaction be more integrated with its physical functionality? Essentially, will the robot-human interaction be controlled more on the user side or the robot side?

Qualcomm Representative: I think that is going to predominantly be very similar to what they can do today already. So, language in the primary interface, what the human is talking about. Where it starts to get interesting is when you start to get into responding to a command. So, for example, if the human would like the robot to go do something that kicks off a task for the robot to be able to complete, and that is usually not a question answer conversational type interaction that usually requires the robot to be able to take on a longer horizon task that brings in additional models that bring in additional tasks that are outside of what humans might typically engage in, but the primary interface will remain the same conversation.

Journalist 17: I'll bring it back to Nvidia. I just want to add that from a CPU and NPU perspective, I think, from a GPU perspective the RTX 5070 class, what I have been missing is like what is called Qualcomm’s view from the GPU premium side of the market. Let's say personal computer market, so I need a bit of clarity there, and the second part would be to just focus it towards the developers and the AI community.

Kedar Kondap: Let me tell you, let me address your first question, which is when we look at launching a particular platform in market, whether it's the Snapdragon X Elite, the X Plus or the X. We always look at what the market needs, and we have a way to size where we feel like workloads are best run on a platform. It's the composition of how you could think about silicon. We have a very powerful GPU. We have the IP that we've invested in the high-performance GPUs and CPUs in-house for the last many, many years. We have to make sure that we're addressing a certain price point from X Elite to X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. We size a significant improvement in our GPU performance, largely to address a certain set at the same time. You have to know that where we're shipping products are in certain price points with that target ASP in mind. I don't know what the industry is looking at with newer platforms are getting launched in market.

I haven't seen any of that data yet, but I'll tell you, all the cores that we support are sized to do that. With respect to their second question on developers, we've come a long way today in terms of where you see developers. Like, the entire developer ecosystem is behind what we've done. I talked massive numbers in terms of apps ecosystem, we talked in terms of developers porting apps natively on platforms, natively on Snapdragon, optimized to the NPU, so we have all the tools, everything that we've provided. So I think you should just expect that as we start moving into this new era of agentic…

Brian asked the question of how we're going to bring all these together, you should assume that we're working with the entire ecosystem, because I'll repeat what I said earlier. We are in a very unique position to be able to bring all of that orchestration, so whether it's a wearable, like an earbud or a watch, all the way to whether it's a PC all the way to whether it's a tablet, auto, XR, you name it. We're going to make sure that we're sizing all our platforms and technology to what the industry needs for that particular segment, so it's very segment-based in terms of how we look at the market.

[Session Ends]

Computex 2026 is well underway, and we’ve provided you with pre-show coverage and all the official announcements this week. You can catch our Day One coverage here and keep track of our dedicated Computex 2026 hub.

Intel acknowledges missteps with Arrow Lake

There’s no question that Intel failed to hit the mark with enthusiasts when it introduced Arrow Lake. Performance regression in games compared to previous-generation chips was the big downer for Arrow Lake, with Intel later blaming developers for not fully optimizing for the new architecture.

However, Intel is now laying it all on the table, saying that it needs to do better. “From an enthusiast perspective, it was... we needed to build back our reputation. I am sure you would agree with that, and this was, hey, [we’re] making sure we are providing value to the gamers, and we start with Arrow Lake Refresh, and we have a very strong roadmap to come,” Intel told us.

• Intel addresses Arrow Lake blunder: 'We needed to build back our reputation' — says Arrow Lake Refresh's low price a key first step, laying the groundwork for Nova Lake

Wi-Fi 8 is on the horizon, but Wi-Fi 7 is by no means going anywhere

Just when we are getting used to Wi-Fi 7 routers and prices have fallen to reasonable levels, Wi-Fi 8 is just around the corner. At the show, Asus revealed its first Wi-Fi 8 gaming router: the ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro. While the new router shares a design with the two-year-old ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro, it features a brand-new chipset that promises to offer vastly improved real-world performance over its Wi-Fi 7 predecessor.

And while Wi-Fi 8 was the talk of the show, MSI touted some high-end Wi-Fi 7 routers, including the RadiX BE19000. The tri-band router amazingly includes an internal PCIe SSD slot. This allows the router to serve as a NAS for file sharing and device backups. Also onboard are two 10 GbE ports and four 2.5 GbE ports.

• Asus unveils its first Wi-Fi 8 router
• MSI unveils latest set of WiFi 7 gaming routers touting ultra-fast speeds

Everything Else...

We can’t get into detail on everything we’ve seen so far at Computex in this wrap-up — we’ll let the individual news stories speak for themselves. Here’s everything else we’ve covered for Computex 2026 Day One:

• Cooler Master shows off new MWE Gold V4 Power supplies and GPU Shield adapter
• Microsoft debuts Surface RTX Spark Dev Box — Nvidia-powered mini-PC helps devs get ready for an agentic Windows
• Cherry XTRFY launches first 8K ultra-wideband gaming keyboardCorsair shows off gaming mouse with dedicated Stream Deck launch button
• Noctua's first AIO starts at around $250 for 240mm variant, features silent Asetek pump and NF-A12/A14 fans
• NZXT showcases H6 mid-tower chassis, new Ultra RGB fans, and a white H2 offering

Regardless of your opinion of Nvidia’s RTX Spark, there’s no doubt that it’s the most consequential consumer announcement to come out of Computex 2026. Unlike Intel, which told Tom’s Hardware it’s handling the launch with “a healthy dose of paranoia,” AMD’s executives are confident that its Strix Halo and upcoming Gorgon Halo products will compete well with the N1X and N1 under the RTX Spark brand.

“I’m really excited that Nvidia has joined the game. You know, we were the only game in town for almost two years now, and the large local memory is becoming super critical in the agentic AI [workloads],” said AMD’s Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client business. “I'm actually happy to see Nvidia join the race for these great products.”

AMD, of course, believes that Strix Halo and eventually Gorgon Halo are positioned well against RTX Spark devices. In a separate discussion, AMD’s Andrej Zdravkovic, chief software officer, said, “At this point in time… I mean, you’re just wrong if you don’t get a Strix Halo notebook,” when speaking on the choice of machine for developers. As the software lead at AMD, however, Zdravkovic is distanced from the hardware. Tikoo had more direct comments on the hardware comparison.

“I’m actually curious about what [Nvidia has] done, but when I look at their specs, their specs are 128 gigs of local memory. We’ve done it on Strix Halo. Their specs are a 20-core CPU. We have a 16-core / 32-thread CPU in here,” Tikoo said. “So, if you just compare the specs, I don’t see… now, Gorgon Halo, which is coming out in Q3, is going to be a better product.”

Hardware is only one part of the battle, which has become clear as AMD continues to push its way into AI infrastructure. Tom’s Hardware asked Zdravkovic about the so-called ‘CUDA moat’ that Nvidia has built for itself, and how AMD plans to address that as it rolls out updates for its own ROCm stack.

“If you asked me the same question like three years ago, I would be, yeah, that really matters. I think that matters less at this point,” Zdravkovic told Tom’s Hardware. “Nvidia has created a phenomenal ecosystem around CUDA, and our advantage is that ROCm is, from a developer point of view, extremely easy to use… the shift from one to another is easy, and the only challenge is if your application ends up using some of the specific commands that Nvidia has and we don’t, and the other way around.”

The posturing against Nvidia is expected, both on the hardware and software side, but Tikoo also pointed out that Nvidia’s entrance into the consumer PC market has downstream benefits for AMD.

“Nvidia has brought validity into the space… I think it’s also going to help the ecosystem move forward faster, right, because Nvidia and [AMD] are the two big players in this space, and both of us now being in this space not only drives the cloud ecosystem, it drives the AI ecosystem in the PC on Windows, and so we’re excited about that,” Tikoo said.

We’re still a few months away before we can see what material impact RTX Spark has on the broader industry, though we expect the initial rollout to be more muted than Nvidia’s keynote suggests. Although Nvidia plans to sell configurations of RTX Spark down as low as 16 GB of memory, the initial configuration will top out at 128 GB and likely demand several thousand dollars. At least initially, it’s a product that looks like it will appeal to a relatively small (but growing) market of AI developers, not dissimilar to Strix Halo.

AMD’s upcoming Gorgon Halo chips are largely a refresh of Strix Halo, leveraging the same Zen 5 cores for the CPU and RDNA 3.5 cores for the GPU, though with a bump up to 192 GB of unified memory. At least from the memory perspective, which continues to be an important specification for AI workloads, AMD has the edge. But, as we’re all well aware, there’s far more that goes into a platform (especially a consumer platform that costs several thousand dollars) than memory alone.

It will be interesting to see how the dynamic between Nvidia and AMD plays out, as we expect Gorgon Halo and RTX Spark to arrive in the same window; AMD says Q3 for Gorgon Halo, while Nvidia has simply said “fall” for RTX Spark.

Intel has published specifications for the Xeon 6377P, a 12-core server processor that pairs enterprise-grade features with clock speeds more commonly associated with high-end desktop CPUs. According to Intel's product database, the chip, based on Bartlett Lake silicon, has a recommended price of $1,045 and is scheduled to launch in Q2 2026. The 6377P is also notable as the first P-core-only processor Intel has placed in its enterprise Xeon lineup.

The Xeon 6377P appears to be an unusual addition to Intel's server lineup. While modern Xeon processors typically emphasize high core counts, large memory capacities, and extensive I/O connectivity, the new chip instead prioritizes frequency, boosting up to 5.7 GHz while maintaining a relatively modest 95W TDP.

Based on the specifications, the chip looks quite different from what most buyers expect from an Xeon. Dual-channel memory, a 128 GB capacity ceiling, 20 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and single-socket-only support are all constraints that would be unremarkable on a workstation processor but stand out on a $1,045 server part.

Intel's Xeon 6 lineup normally spans the high-core-count Granite Rapids P-core parts and the 288-E-core Clearwater Forest and Sierra Forest parts. Dropping a 12-core Bartlett Lake die — basically a desktop CPU with ECC support and a server product code — into this family appears to be a deliberate choice to address single-socket, entry-level server deployments where raw core count matters less than per-core performance and platform familiarity.

One standout number is the 5.7 GHz maximum turbo — unusually high for server silicon, where power efficiency and core density typically dominate the conversation. The 95W TDP — genuinely low for a $1,045 server chip — makes that figure even more impressive.

Now, not every enterprise workload needs dozens of cores. Electronic design automation, CAD, software compilation, financial modeling, and certain industrial control workloads are often bottlenecked by single-threaded or lightly threaded performance. For those use cases, a 5.7 GHz Xeon with ECC memory, PCIe 5.0, platform validation, and guaranteed long-term availability is a more targeted fit than a 64-core EPYC with slower per-core clocks.

On the other hand, the competitive picture is less flattering. AMD's EPYC 4005 series, built on Zen 5, targets the same single-socket entry-level segment at lower price points and with a newer architecture. The earlier EPYC 4004 series topped out at 16 cores on AM5 — more cores than the 6377P at a lower RCP. Intel's counter-argument may be per-core performance and the existing LGA1700 platform ecosystem. However, the chip's AVX2-only instruction set, with no AVX-512 support, may give pause to workloads that can use wider vector operations — a notable omission at this price.

So, why would a buyer choose the 6377P over a Core i9 running on a high-end desktop board? The answer probably lies in what consumer platforms don't offer: certified ECC support, validated system configurations, and the multi-year product lifecycle commitments that enterprise procurement often requires.

Intel has not indicated whether the 6377P will be compatible with existing consumer LGA1700 motherboards, and given its Server/Enterprise use designation, OEM system availability is the more likely path to market.

Intel knows that Arrow Lake dealt a huge blow to its reputation among gamers and enthusiasts. The underperforming chips sporting a radically different architecture didn’t make the cut in games, underperforming in some titles compared to even last-gen parts, and although application performance is competitive, it isn’t enough to earn a spot among the best CPUs. Tom’s Hardware asked Intel’s Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of product management for Intel’s Client Computing Group, about the low prices of the newer Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 250K Plus at Computex 2026, and he told us the prices were chosen to help build back Intel’s reputation.

We’ve presented this same question to Intel multiple times before, and always with the same response. Fundamentally, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus undermines Intel’s existing Arrow Lake range. It’s faster in games and applications compared to the Core Ultra 9 285K, and it costs half the price. So, we pressed Neelalojanan further about this issue in an attempt to understand why exactly Intel decided to target such aggressive pricing.

“From an enthusiast perspective, it was... we needed to build back our reputation. I am sure you would agree with that, and this was, hey, [we’re] making sure we are providing value to the gamers, and we start with Arrow Lake Refresh, and we have a very strong roadmap to come,” Neelalojanan told me. “In terms of desktop, that was an effort to [say] ‘let's go with value focus first, and that will help us then gain confidence.’ I mean, this is obvious... I'm not saying anything which you already don't know.”

The next step in that roadmap is Nova Lake, which is a generation Intel has been talking about for quite some time. The company has reiterated that Nova Lake is set to launch at the end of 2026, but it’s not clear if we’ll have actual products by then. Speaking to a different Intel representative, they told me that demand for CPUs spans everywhere from the data center down to mainstream laptops, and that the company sometimes has meetings on a daily basis to address these changes. The rapidly evolving market around CPUs could push Nova Lake out to next year, but, at the moment, Nova Lake is still slated for the end of the year.

It seems like each new generation that isn’t a refresh from Intel is some make-or-break moment, but outside of the hype, Nova Lake has a lot of interesting murmurs surrounding it. First and most obvious is bLLC. We’ve heard continual rumors that Intel is working on a “big last-level cache” in a bid to finally combat AMD’s X3D chips, and apparently, that will show up with Nova Lake. Intel hasn’t confirmed that’s the case yet, of course.

Nova Lake has a different context compared to the launch of Arrow Lake Refresh, as well. My conversations with Intel point to a reset in the company’s enthusiast roadmap, as it clearly knows the damage Arrow Lake did to its reputation. We’re still far off from Nova Lake pricing discussions, but given the aggressive rollout of Arrow Lake Refresh, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Intel undercut AMD across the spectrum.

Neelalojanan certainly implies that’s the case. We’ll need to wait until Intel has more to share on Nova Lake, which hopefully we will hear about soon. Again, the company has said Nova Lake is on track for the end of 2026, so barring a delay announcement, that’s when we expect to see the chips in the flesh.

If you ask a computer enthusiast, particularly an Intel one, what they hate most, it’s having to upgrade to a new motherboard to take advantage of the best CPUs. However, a shift may be on the horizon. According to reputable Intel hardware leaker Jaykihn, Intel may finally be following AMD’s footsteps in long-term socket longevity. The upcoming LGA1954 socket reportedly has the potential to support multiple generations of next-generation chips, starting from Nova Lake, Razor Lake, and beyond.

Upgrading motherboards has always been a point of frustration for Intel customers. Buying a new processor comes with the hidden cost of a new motherboard and sometimes the need to replace other components along the way. A longer socket lifespan would definitely make Intel platforms more appealing to consumers, and it would reduce the hassle and expense of frequent motherboard upgrades, something Intel users have been asking for ages.

If Jaykihn's information is accurate, upcoming LGA1954 motherboards featuring the 900-series chipset, especially the enthusiast-oriented Z series, will have a 64MB BIOS SPI ROM. Therefore, future processors released after Razor Lake can work on these motherboards without encountering firmware size limitations. As a result, Z970 and Z990 motherboards are probably the prime candidates for extended compatibility.

Interestingly, the leaker notes that Intel is seemingly recommending, but not requiring, manufacturers of more mainstream boards like the B960 to also use 64MB BIOS chips. It will create a significant distinction between buyers at different price points. As expected, enthusiasts and high-end users will enjoy more seamless support for future processors, while the budget-conscious consumers might face some limitations depending on the motherboard brand. With AMD's AM4 socket, some vendors put larger BIOS chips on accessible motherboards with B-series chipsets. We could see something similar with Intel's LGA1954 platform.

Logically, motherboard vendors will need to take a more future-proofing approach in design and support. One of the key considerations will be equipping Intel 900-series motherboards with either one large BIOS chip or two smaller BIOS chips to accommodate firmware for future processors. Supporting multiple generations of processors on a single platform signals additional investment by motherboard manufacturers.

For example, with AMD’s AM4 socket, the chipmaker released so many different processors for the platform over its lifespan that some motherboards, particularly the more affordable models with smaller BIOS chips, eventually had to sacrifice backward compatibility or remove features to make room for the latest ones.

If we take a stroll down memory lane, the LGA775 socket has probably been Intel's longest-lived mainstream socket. The LGA775 socket, introduced 22 years ago, was home to four generations of Intel processors. Most sockets after that only supported two generations, if we omit refreshes. The LGA2011 socket had similar longevity to LGA775 and supported four different architectures, but it's technically a HEDT socket.

If Intel is indeed pursuing the long game with LGA1954, it would mark a significant milestone in the chipmaker's history. AMD has already voiced its commitment to supporting the existing AM5 socket through 2029. The LGA1954 socket, which will debut later this year alongside Intel's Nova Lake how processors, could change the way consumers perceive the Intel platform if Intel delivers on rumored long-term platform support.

Computex 2026 is moving full steam ahead, like an AI train running down a track made of gold-plated DDR5 DIMMs. We’ve moved into the first full day of the trade show, and the announcements are really starting to fill in. You can catch our Day Zero coverage here and keep track of our dedicated Computex 2026 hub.

Arm PC chips are back in focus

Windows on Arm is not new; the first-generation Surface RT launched way back in 2012 with an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. Since then, we’ve seen various other takes on Arm processors running on Windows, from the Surface Pro X with its Microsoft SQ1 SoC to a slew of laptops running Qualcomm’s PC-centric Snapdragon processors.

Now, we’re seeing an even more interest in the segment with Nvidia RTX Spark “Superchip” and the new Snapdragon C from Qualcomm. From all accounts, the RTX Spark targets the high end of the PC market with its 20-core Arm CPU, Blackwell RTX GPU, and 128GB of unified memory.

The Snapdragon C takes a different approach, instead aiming at the budget laptop segment. Laptops using Snapdragon C are expected to be priced as low as $300. However, that price point will be highly dependent on memory pricing, which remains a real pain point not only for OEMs, but also consumers looking to get the most bang for their computing buck. In fact, things have gotten so bad that even Intel has said that "something has to give” with memory prices.

• Nvidia's RTX Spark could capitalize where Qualcomm's Arm-based efforts have not
• Jensen Huang says Nvidia wants to 'reinvent the single most important tool of humanity' with RTX Spark
• Qualcomm aims the Snapdragon C laptop chip at the budget laptop segment, as manufacturers feel the DRAM squeeze
• Intel says 'something has to give' with memory prices

We get hands-on time with Asus’ latest hardware at Computex

Asus always has a large presence at Computex, and this year was no exception. The company had an extensive cast of new characters in the laptop field, with new Vivobooks, Zenbooks, Expertbooks, and Strix Scar gaming laptops. Of the new models introduced, the Zenbook 14 with an Intel processor and 14-inch 2880 x 1800 OLED display caught my attention.

Asus also had a rather cool-looking ROG 20th anniversary Harpe II Extreme Edition wireless mouse and the ROG Azoth Extreme Edition 20 mechanical keyboard. The devices are finished primarily in black, but feature 24-karat gold accents. The keyboard also includes transparent switches and keycaps. And we can’t get past its 3.5-pound heft, thanks to its all-metal chassis.

• Asus shows off updated Zenbook and Strix Scar laptops, along with a TUF-based Gaming desktop
• Hands-on with Asus’ ROG Harpe II Extreme Edition 20 gaming mouse
• Hands-on with Asus’ ROG Azoth Extreme Edition 20 mechanical keyboard

PCIe 6.0 SSDs are on the horizon

A year ago at Computex 2025, we saw prototype PCIe 6.0 SSDs capable of 30+ GB/s speeds. This year, we’re slowly inching towards production-capable hardware, with Phison showing off its latest PCIe 6.0 SSD controller: the X3. The X3 is a 16-channel design that is capable of 28 GB/s sequential read/write speeds and 6.8 million random read/write IOPS.

According to Phison, the controller will begin sampling to customers by the end of 2026, with volume production starting in mid-2027.

• Phison shows PCIe 6.0 X3 SSD controller with 28 GB/s of bandwidth and 6.8 million IOPS, supports 2 petabytes per drive

Everything else

We can’t get into detail on everything we’ve seen so far at Computex in this wrap-up — we’ll let the individual news stories speak for themselves. Here’s everything else we’ve covered for Computex 2026 Day One:

• Noctua announces new thermal pad for AMD chips in partnership with Carbice
• Gigabyte debuts fourth-gen Tandem WOLED and multi-mode Mini LED gaming monitors
• Gigabyte showcases new Infinity products for its 40th anniversary
• Cooler Master shows off new HAF 500 chassis, aluminum fans, and new air coolers
• AMD ‘had to re-engineer’ the Ryzen 7 5800X3D for a re-release

Following Panther Lake, Intel's upcoming Nova Lake family is set to be a true next-gen leap as well. While Panther Lake is mobile-only, Nova Lake is desktop-first but also has mobile parts, just like the current Arrow Lake (refresh) lineup. Prior leaks have indicated that NVL scales from 6 cores all the way up to 52 cores at the top-end, but a new rumor from tipster Jaykihn says the 6-core mobile SKU has been shelved.

As you'd expect, the 6-core part in question would've been the lowest-end offering from Nova Lake, targeted entirely at the budget segment. The issue is, Intel already launched a product for this market, and it's called Wildcat Lake — the successor to Twin Lake. The lineup was announced in April and is meant exclusively for low-end laptops, mini-PCs, and edge. It shares an architectural foundation with Panther Lake and is limited to 6 cores.

The 6-core Nova Lake SKU would have reportedly featured 2 P-cores and 4 LP-E cores, which is the same as Wildcat Lake's current maxed-out configuration. The difference would lie in the architecture since Nova Lake is expected to switch to Coyote Cove P-cores and Arctic Wolf E-cores/LP-E cores, while Wildcat Lake (and Panther Lake) right now use Cougar Cove P-cores and Darkmont E-cores/LP-E cores.

Therefore, a Nova Lake CPU featuring 6 cores would overlap with Wildcat Lake, or more specifically, whatever the Wildcat Lake refresh will be. Either product could end up cannibalizing the other, but since Wildcat Lake already exists with unneeded I/O stripped out to save costs, it makes sense to leave the entry-level Nova Lake silicon behind. After all, demand for Wildcat Lake is exceeding Intel's own expectations.

With the advent of Apple's MacBook Neo, there's a rejuvenated interest in capturing this segment of the market since the Neo is so competitive. At Computex 2026, we've seen a few promising options that should challenge the Neo with perhaps even better specs, all powered by Wildcat Lake. Putting a costlier Nova Lake chip in one of these laptops next year just wouldn't allow for aggressive pricing.

AMD just launched the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, which is a strange entry in AMD’s AM5 lineup given that it’s built on the Zen 4 architecture rather than Zen 5. We asked AMD’s David McAfee, VP and general manager of Ryzen and Radeon, at Computex 2026, why the company went with Zen 4 over a six-core Zen 5 part. After all, we’ve seen the six-core Ryzen 5 7600X3D but not a Zen 5 replacement. McAfee told us that “may be something that we look at doing… later this year.”

“I think as we go through the rest of this year, I mean we're always looking for ways to, you know, create as many options as we can, and that may become… maybe something that we look at doing as a runway product later this year, simply because you know we know the pressures that are there in building systems aren't going away anytime soon,” McAfee told Tom’s Hardware.

A lot of hedging is required here because McAfee didn’t confirm that the Ryzen 5 9600X3D is in development, nor that it will, for sure, come this year. But it’s clearly something AMD has thought about, and the decision not to release a six-core part at this time came down to more than die allocation.

“The 7600X3D, that has been more of a limited run product, where it really isn’t, you know, day-in day-out available from all of our partners,” McAfee said. “From a supply standpoint, I’m not going to say it’s more difficult to make, but one that doesn’t naturally occur as much as an eight-core product. So, we have been a little bit more selective with how we’ve used the six-core products.”

Broadly, however, McAfee says the decision to release the Ryzen 7 7700X3D came down to a preference from gamers for an eight-core chip, despite recognizing that “the difference between eight cores and six cores isn't huge in terms of gaming,” at least across a broad range of titles. Certain games will see a performance loss with six cores as opposed to eight, but they’re few and far between.

We saw that in action in our recent review of the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, in fact. Despite being nearly two years old, the chip holds up surprisingly well in today’s market at its $230 price on Amazon ($200 in-store at Micro Center). In our testing, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is just 4.5% slower than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D on average, despite sporting a massive cut to TDP, two fewer cores, and less cache.

Given the context of six-core X3D parts more broadly, if AMD decides to introduce the Ryzen 5 9600X3D, it likely won’t be a far-reaching chip like the eight-core parts are. The Ryzen 5 7600X3D remains a Micro Center exclusive chip, though the retailer recently started selling directly on Amazon, opening up availability for enthusiasts that don’t have a physical retail location nearby.

That has vastly lowered the barrier to entry with X3D CPUs, especially as Zen 3 options have dried up in the market. Prior to the Ryzen 5 7600X3D showing up online, you’d have to spend at least $350 (and likely more) to get an X3D CPU. The Ryzen 7 7700X3D pushes that entry point down further at its $330 suggested retail price. However, an eight-core part, assuming a similar price range between $200 and $250, would push that barrier to entry even lower.

McAfee recognizes how that could benefit gamers in this supply-constrained environment of high memory and storage prices, pointing to the benefits of a large L3 cache when running slower, or even single-channel, memory.

AMD finally reintroduced the Ryzen 7 5800X3D at Computex 2026, more than four years after it originally launched in a bid to combat rising DDR5 prices. Despite the re-release looking like a simple product spin-up, AMD’s David McAfee, VP and general manager of Radeon and Ryzen, says that “a whole body of engineering work” went into the re-release, as the original bonding process TSMC used for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was no longer available.

“It's not as simple as just bringing back the 5800X3D,” McAfee said. “The original stacking process that was used at TSMC changed when we went from first-gen to second-gen cache, so we had to re-engineer that product, and there actually was a fair amount of development that went into bringing back the 5800X3D.”

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D used TSMC’s SoIC or System-on-Integrated-Chips hybrid bonding technology. It uses a combination of “hot” and “cold” bonding to marry two pieces of silicon together, which then share power with through-silicon vias (TSV). Fundamentally, this connection hasn’t changed over the course of 3D V-Cache’s existence, but it has evolved. With the move to Ryzen 7000, AMD had to make some changes to the 3D V-Cache design, which it then carried forward with Ryzen 9000.

To avoid any confusion, when we talk about second-gen 3D V-Cache here, we’re not talking about AMD’s new packaging available on Zen 5 CPUs, where SRAM is placed under the CCD rather than on top, as is the case with Zen 4 and 3 X3D chips. We’re talking about the bonding process that AMD used at TSMC, which changed from first-gen X3D chips to second-gen X3D chips.

“It completely changed the characteristics of how those two pieces of silicon are bonded together and how they were stacked together, and so when that first-gen facility really kind of went offline, then it meant there was a whole, you know, body of engineering work that had to be done to understand if we could even migrate the 5800X3D to the new, second-generation stacking process,” McAfee said.

It’s possible that AMD intended to bring back the Ryzen 7 5800X3D sooner, though McAfee stopped short of saying that outright. The shift in packaging helps explain the Ryzen 7 5800X3D’s (and eventually the 5700X3D’s) absence from the market. The chip has seen spotty availability over the past two years, and it’s been completely sold out over the past year, with resellers demanding as much as $800 on the secondhand market.

“That's been a lot of the work that's kind of been going on in the background to get us to where we are today, is redoing the qualification of that stacking process, building samples, testing to make sure that the reliability is top notch for consumers who might want to buy this product, and then, you know, kind of rolling it out and ramping it into production again in a new process of stacking those dies together,” McAfee told Tom’s Hardware.

You can read more about second-gen SoIC in our SoIC roadmap on Tom’s Hardware Premium, though it has far more implications for the data center (at least currently) than for consumer chips. Regardless, AMD couldn’t simply reintroduce the Ryzen 7 5800X3D; instead reworking the chip to work with TSMC’s second-generation stacking process. McAfee says it ended up being “a labor of love” for the engineers to work on this part again, as the company went through testing and validation for a re-release.

Intel’s Arc G3 chips are gunning for the AMD-dominated, high-tier integrated graphics market that has become such an important enabler of the modern handheld PC gaming experience. But as high-memory prices push up the costs of even entry-level discrete GPUs, there could be much more of a place for powerful onboard graphics in the PC gaming landscape in the years to come.

We sat down with Intel’s Senior Director of Product Management, Nish Neelalojanan, in Taipei, Taiwan, at Computex 2026 to talk more about the G3’s development and how it fits into Intel’s lineup. Here, we're presenting the full transcript of our conversation.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jake Roach, Tom's Hardware: So what was the idea behind the G3, because you guys have tried before, right? I believe it was with MSI? And now you’re putting a bigger emphasis behind it with a whole new branding.

Nish Neelalojanan, Director of Product Management, Intel: It was a combination of two things. So first of all, we started trying already with Meteor Lake, and yes, we were experimenting. This was all standard off-the-shelf parts, and we learned a lot as we came into Lunar Lake. The power management for handheld needed to be more customized, so we started tweaking further, and as we got into Panther Lake, the architecture lent itself to lower power gaming. We moved the E-Cores onto the performance cluster, so you have E-Cores both on your efficiency island and your performance cluster, that means your E-Cores have access to L3 cache, so E-Cores are now performant enough to run games.

A lot of the time, in a low-power scenario, you are more GPU-bound than CPU-bound because the GPU is power starved, so if you can reduce the power on CPU and dump it on the GPU, you'll get much better performance. So, with that architecture change with Panther Lake, now is the perfect time. All the goodness we've learned, we can capitalize on it. We have a silicon architecture, we can lend itself to low power, and we have big enough graphics now…

Jake Roach: A really impressive iGPU.

Nish Neelalojanan: So, that is what had the impetus on, hey, what if we did a CPU line, which is graphics first, or leading with a very big graphics, but small enough CPU that doesn't grab enough power, but good enough to run all your handheld games. It's great for handheld gaming or non-PC form factor, running low-power gaming. So we wanted to start a line of products, which would be integrated graphics forward, with the right CPU.

Jake Roach: And these are wholly unique entries, right? If I remember correctly, there's no 14-core Panther Lake.

Nish Neelalojanan: These are completely unique chips. So they are based off the same die, but we've optimized it with, like I said, core count, so that taking two P-Cores off, because most of the games are going to run on the E-Cores on the performance cluster, you also cut down on different I/Os, so you don't need as many ports on a handheld as you would need on a laptop, right, so you cut down, so it's cutting down all the things you don't need.

Jake Roach: Really focusing it on that form factor.

Nish Neelalojanan: Yeah, that will be on the hardware, and then software-wise, we have a lot of other software optimization. So, now in order to have them pinned onto the E-Core, we have a BIOS control optimizer, so extra ways to have your thread director direct your game threads onto your E-Cores.

It's basically making sure we are directing the game threads onto the E-Core. [We also have the] ability to do power gating, so that we have features like endurance gaming, which we had on the laptops. Now, for handheld, we've added some features, so you can go with different presets. You can say, I want 60 frames per second, and then it will optimize your profile accordingly, or I want 30 frames per second. So you have a frame cap, and then your SOC resourcing is optimized, so that you will increase your battery life 2, 3, 4, hours.

Jake Roach: Battery life is so important for a handheld, right? I was playing a little Forza Horizon 6 on the plane coming over, and one way that I'm doing that right now on Linux is with Lossless Scaling, with frame generation in any game. As you're saying, apply that 30 fps cap frame generation to the mix, and you can get really good perceived performance.

Right now, you guys have multi-frame generation through XeSS 3 through specific games, but there's no driver. Is that something you're looking into, given how important that can be for the local gaming experience?

Nish Neelalojanan: So, 100 plus games have already enabled MFG, but you could imagine, as you said, it's important. So we're exploring, but as we get closer, we'll talk more about when and where it intercepts.

Jake Roach: The other thing I did want to ask about was form factors, which is something you kind of hinted at. Right now, with component prices being so high on just a typical DIY PC, we're seeing a really big push for budget laptops for people that maybe don't need as big of graphics and handhelds for people that really care about gaming as a laptop replacement. I'm just curious, kind of broadly, what you think about the dynamics between these form factors? Is this something that is just a temporary market connection, given that prices are so expensive, and are you planning around that, or is it something more long-term? Where do you think these are going to be the preferred form factors?

Nish Neelalojanan: I think, from a budget-conscious perspective of value buyers, our core 300 series, I think probably this is the first time in a long time the mainstream is getting some of the new ideas, right? So, today if you take a value-conscious segment in the past, it was always, hey, you have the big innovation, which we launched, it gets waterfall down. But as the innovation started getting expensive more and more, that waterfall did not happen, it was basically take the old chip, do some minor updates. So we wanted to take all these new like battery life performance uplifts, and you know, having the new AI updates, all of that, but to be able to be affordable, that's what is Wildcat Lake, or Core 300 series. So that's kind of for the budget-conscious buyer, we wanted to make sure we put some new IPs out there, because I don't think anyone is putting that out.

So that's part A. Part B of your question is handheld as a form factor. I think handheld as a form factor is interesting. Different people are trying to do multipurpose use, so would it ever go from companion to main? TBD. But can it expand its use cases from, hey, can I have a handheld, can I have a docked experience? I think long-term, yes. Currently, the software interfaces and a lot of the, let's say, ecosystem around it needs to evolve for it to be meaningful, but there's a lot of experimentation around dock experiences and stuff, which we are working with partners to experiment, but as it stands, I think handheld alone as it's gaming first.

A lot of our partners are experimenting; they're having all those capabilities available. How can you dock, how can you connect keyboard and mouse directly, and then be able to do it, because, like you said, costs are going up. If someone buys this, they want to be maximizing it.

Arrow Lake refresh's positioning

Jake Roach You touched on Wildcat Lake in the mobile segment, and recently we had Arrow Lake refresh, which was a really big readjustment in pricing. In particular, I'm just kind of curious to get more color on that, because when I reviewed those chips, I the expectations, I was briefed on them, and I was like, I know what to expect, but it was a very different Intel than I was used to working with on the desktop run.

Nish Neelalojanan: Short answer would be, we wanted to make sure we are putting out things which gamers would care about and show that we care about gamers, so this was an attempt or step one in getting to that expectation, right? And then obviously same thing with handhelds, making sure we are putting something which the gamers would want, so that's the highest level.

Jake Roach: I mean, again, seeing the results, we've essentially made the original Arrow Lake line outside of a few chips, irrelevant with these two chips. The 270K Plus scales above 285k and 250K can go toe to toe with either the Core Seven or Five.

Nish Neelalojanan: That’s a good thing, right?

Jake Roach: That is a good thing, but it's a good thing for us. It is not a good thing for Intel, right? Like, internally, that undermines your own product. And so I'm curious about the decision there, because at some point you had to have had pushback on, hey, this $300 Core 7 is going to undermine our $600 Core 9 flagship.

Nish Neelalojanan: It was just a decision made with end users in mind, and we want to make sure we are providing value as we come out, and if at all we need to start somewhere, right? And in terms of desktop, that was an effort to let's go with value focus first, and that will help us then gain confidence. From an enthusiast perspective, we needed to build back our reputation. I am sure you would agree with that, and this was, we’re making sure we are providing value to the gamers, and we start with Arrow Lake Refresh, and we have a very strong roadmap to come, so we want to continue.

Jake Roach: It did seem like an appetizer, almost, given you know everything that happened with Arrow Lake, and yeah, I appreciate you wearing that a little bit, because those were again, they were very interesting parts for a number of reasons.

Nish Neelalojanan: Savior [Kim, Intel Director of Client Communications] can correct me if I said something I shouldn't, but that was kind of highest level.

Leaving Hyper-threading behind

Jake Roach: Another question I had; This is more on the mobile side of things, or SoC side of things, is around hyper threading. So I have this question for the Xeon folks that I'm meeting with later today, because there have been comments in the financial reports, comments about returning hyper threading to the data center, whole lot of stuff around that on the consumer side of things. You guys left hyper threading behind with Arrow Lake. I'm wondering now that we have a desktop generation, a mobile generation under your belt. What do you see with that move to get rid of hyper-threading? And is there any consideration for maybe going back to some form of SMT in the future?

Nish Neelalojanan: Highest level, our decisions are always are we getting the right level of performance. The best way to achieve that performance is what we want to go with. Like you said before, with Arrow Lake Refresh, you're not only getting the right game performance at the right price point, but you're also getting almost 2x multi-threaded performance compared to competition, right? So, if you can deliver that without SMT, though the end user, it doesn't matter to the end user. In fact, you're actually getting even better multi-threaded performance because they're actual physical codes versus virtual threads, right? So that's where I would leave it at. We always reevaluate, but it's the best way to give that level of performance in that given price band or that given SKU. So we continue to keep re-evaluating, and different segments may need different things.

Jake Roach: Right now it sounds like it's working out well?

Nish Neelalojanan: Yeah, and like in terms of all the different agentic AI workloads, you need CPU as an orchestrator, having nth number of threads, cleaning up data, lining up a memory, a lot of threads help. So, like I said, when there is utility, and when there is a need, we will constantly evaluate it's, it's rigid to say, oh, it's behind us, or it's rigid to say, oh, we are going to run towards it: If it makes sense, it makes sense, yes. That’s where the data center decision is. They talk more about the growing workload, there is a need.

Jake Roach: It has been interesting. We're coming up at Tom's Hardware on 30 years, and we did a retrospective on CPUs, so I went back to the very first Pentium Two review on Tom's Hardware, and seeing the hyper-threading, and how it was used over decades, it was really fascinating to look at.

Nish Neelalojanan: A lot of the low-power segments, like now, handheld, yes? Those eight E-Cores on that performance cluster are significantly helping with all the low-power gaming, right? So, a lot of these decisions are paying off as it stands. As the workload evolves, as we evolve into different architectures, we will have to evaluate based on at that time what would be the right decision. Okay.

Jake Roach: For years now, Intel Foundry has laid out a really aggressive foundry roadmap. We saw 18A first and now we finally have 18A in data center with Xeon Six Plus. Is that the kind of the cadence we should expect going forward for Intel's cutting-edge hooks to see them debut first on the consumer front?

Nish Neelalojanan: It's the same answer I said before wherever it makes sense first. So we've got especially a lot of our consumer client CPUs, we pick the right process node, which made sense for the right tile, especially now we have multi-chip solution. It gives us the flexibility to pick and choose the right process node for cost, readiness, optimizing for R&D, because sometimes you won't have that IP on a different process, so it's easier to just reuse it, based on availability. Sometimes it's costing some bigger tiles, you can put it on latest and get it to get performance. Some of the tiles where you don't need to push frequency as much, you put it on an older node. And now with all the supply in and around the industry, picking the right process nodes, which is more available, is also going to be important. So we always go through all of these considerations and pick and choose, so there is no settling on client will start data center will follow, vice versa. It's we pick the right process choice based on that architecture, for that side.

Reacting to Nvidia's RTX Spark

Jake Roach: I want to get your reaction to [Nvidia’s RTX Spark]. If you need any better reminder that Twitter is not real life, there's a lot of talk on Twitter that Nvidia entering this market completely decimates and it rules everything. I don't think that's true, but I want to see your reaction to Nvidia getting into that space.

Nish Neelalojanan: I mean, Nvidia puts out great products, and they know how to do gaming. They know how to do all these different things. So we always take everything with a healthy dose of paranoia, but we are also very, very confident with our products, in the sense that X86… Let me put it this way, when we entered this discrete graphics business, our graphics business, it took a painful few years for us to work through all the drivers, all the compatibility issues, and everything ironed out, same thing goes on when an ARM CPU enters a market that's going to be tons of compatibility DRM issues, backward compatibility As a result, we are very confident that we have the right CPU, GPU mix for clients, both for gaming and when it comes to what you call AI inference workloads.

That said, Nvidia is a great partner. We will continue to work with them. You saw some of our announcements. We have some longer-term commitments with them, so both of us have different parts of the roadmap that we will expand together, where there'll be a roadmap where we will be partnering, and where there might be places where we will be competing, but I think it's great for the industry that there is different choices.

Jake Roach: I know, it's a weird situation, especially for Intel, because you guys, you guys do work with Nvidia. Yeah, when I pose similar questions to the other guys, they, they're a little bit more fiery in their responses.

Nish Neelalojanan: Compatibility is going to be a key thing there. x86 on the CPU side is going to have a lot of advantages. We talked about some of the new instruction sets, which got announced by the x86 Consortium, a lot of those lend itself as much to gaming as much as AI, and you'll see a lot of that being talked about more.

A lot of it were agentic AI examples and stuff, because you have to say AI three times before you can talk about anything else, but they also help with gaming significantly, so yeah, it doubles the amount of registers, which you would execute one instruction, so it's based off of AVX, but there’s a few others which came out with it.

The health of the consumer PC market

Jake Roach: Finally I want your reaction more broadly to the PC market right now, because we have all the rising component prices, we have very expensive laptops. On the desktop, it's really, really hard to build a PC right now. I think motherboard sales are down some 30-40% I know you're releasing products to address that market between Wildcat Lake and Arrow Lake pretty refresh, but I kind of want to see your reaction to how that pans out over the next maybe three to five years. Is it a continual area of focus, or is it something that hopefully we're just dealing with over the next few years, where we're really focusing on the budget segment?

Nish Neelalojanan: Large memory is completely overshadowing any CPU prices, right? Memory and storage. The CPU is not anymore determining your system price point, and when you're paying that amount, people will obviously start upgrading. Now, that said, there are still Panther Lake systems you can get below $1,500 out there, right? It's going to be dependent on OEM. It's going to be dependent on markets, and even the Wildcat Lake, they'll announce a $599 starting price point. Yeah, so there are definitely designs which are coming at comparatively reasonable price points, which are available, and longer term, I think something has to give right. The over inflation, we will have to keep an eye, but if I could predict the memory market, I would be rich in stock!

Jake Roach: Let me phrase the question a little bit better, because are you making plans for a longer term, a longer term squeeze on the consumer front, because surely you're going to have to make those plans if you see the headwinds going that way.

Nish Neelalojanan: We do have products with support for DDR4 both on desktop and mobile, so Raptor Lake, you're not end of life in any of them, they're there. We'll continue to make sure that there are products which can take care of older memory technologies if they're available and cheap. Second thing is, we are making sure we are validating lower configs as well. Wildcat Lake starts at 8GB, Wildcat Lake is a single channel product, so there are products which can leverage with low memory and give reasonably good performance, so we are doing everything we can from our perspective to be able to help in any small way. But like I said, when CPU becomes the least relevant from an overall BOM (Bill of Materials) perspective, because it's so expensive. Then we also have CPUs you can buy out into that.

Jake Roach: Speaking of memory, I don't know if you had any involvement with half ranked? Is that what they call them, half ranked DIMMs from ASRock? It was with ASRock and Intel.

Nish Neelalojanan: I am not familiar with that, but we are working with a lot of indigenous memory suppliers to validate them, so we’re doing everything we can in terms of it's not just one, two, or three. If there are some local specific memory vendors, but like in PRC, and now Indonesia is even bringing up a couple of them. We're trying to validate as much as we can, so there's enough choice that people can get pockets of relief. Right? We are looking at UFS for a longer-term horizon, so that every little thing helps, right?

Jake Roach: Absolutely. I appreciate you taking the time and talking over everything. I'm very excited to see the G3 chips in action. I saw them yesterday at the Acer showcase, and I played a little bit of Forza Horizon 6, and these are pretty good.

Nish Neelalojanan: With G3 at least we're putting out some latest and greatest stuff, and in terms of a lot of these, it's not necessarily exclusive. We're broadly available, the 12 Xe on the PC side, and on the handheld, it's not like limited to one OEM. Unlike some people who hold it back, just only give it to one OEM.

Jake Roach: So all these handhelds, I believe all the ones that announced are all Windows-based handhelds. Is there consideration for Linux? How much consideration or weight do you put on that, given things like Steam OS proper?

Nish Neelalojanan: So highest level stuff we announced now is Windows based, but you can take those devices and install… and I'm sure you would imagine we would continuously want to make sure that those experiences are reasonable for end users, and we are, we would talk more about as we get closer to something, but we are exploring beyond Windows, and as we get closer, we'll talk more about.

[Session ends]

Intel recognizes the memory squeeze that’s been a plague on the PC market for the past several months. While highlighting options like Wildcat Lake and older Raptor Lake options, Intel’s Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of product management for Intel’s Client Computing Group, sat down with Tom’s Hardware at Computex 2026 to discuss the company’s outlook on the computing market, ranging from Nvidia’s recent RTX Spark announcement to ongoing memory shortages, saying “something has to give” with the latter.

“Longer term, I think something has to give, right? The over-inflation, we will have to keep an eye out,” Neelalojanan told me. “But if I could predict the memory market, I would be rich in stock.”

I asked Neelalojanan more specifically if Intel was planning around memory shortages and making any adjustments to its strategy going forward. And the answer, surprisingly, is yes, though not in the way you might expect. Neelalojanan pointed to Raptor Lake and Wildcat Lake as products that address memory shortages currently, and said that the company will continue to support products on older memory standards as long as it makes sense.

“We do have products that support DDR4 on both desktop and mobile. Raptor Lake, we’re not end-of-life-ing any of them; they’re there. We’ll continue to make sure that there are products which can take care of older memory technologies if they’re available and cheap,” Neelalojanan told me. “Second thing is, we are making sure we are validating lower configs [for Wildcat Lake] as well. Wildcat Lake starts at 8GB. Wildcat Lake is a single-channel product, so there are products which can leverage low memory and give reasonably good performance.”

Wildcat Lake, and entry-level laptop designs more broadly, have been a big focus of Computex. Presumably in response to the MacBook Neo, Intel, of course, has its Wildcat Lake options, but Qualcomm is targeting that market, as well, with its new Snapdragon C chips. AMD doesn’t have a product targeting this market of sub-$600 laptops quite yet, but we plan on asking the company about its plans this week at Computex.

We’ve seen a shift toward cheaper options on the desktop, as well. AMD just reintroduced the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and launched the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, two CPUs that use older architectures. Under normal circumstances, they’d be unamusing at best. Under current circumstances, they’re putting components into a market that’s begging for them.

“Large memory is completely overshadowing any CPU prices, right, memory and storage… CPU is not any more determining your system price point,” Neelalojanan said. “We are working with a lot of indigenous memory suppliers and validating them, so we’re doing everything we can… it’s not just one, two or three. If there are local-specific memory vendors, like in [China] and now Indonesia is even bringing up a couple of them. We’re trying to validate as much as we can so there’s enough choice that people can get pockets of relief.”

Intel didn’t, however, say that it’s reintroducing any products along the lines of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition. At the moment, it seems Intel is focused more on supporting DDR4-based options and keeping them on the market, at least until the memory squeeze loosens its grip.

Nvidia announced its new RTX Spark Superchip this week, opening the door for a new era of Windows on Arm computing. While the show focused mostly on agentic AI, gaming is another big selling point for the platform. As such, both Nvidia and Microsoft are working with developers around the world to bring popular anti-cheat software and DRM support to the RTX Spark natively.

It's ironic that Windows is the harbinger of such a development when the issue has been largely associated with Windows alternatives to begin with. For instance, Linux gaming has always been held back by the fact that some games simply won't work on the OS due to the lack of anti-cheat software. Games like Fortnite, Valorant, Rocket League, and more won't even boot.

Arm-based devices raise another challenge. Since most of these games are compiled for x86, they have to be emulated through Microsoft's Prism translation layer. This already incurs a performance loss, but because emulation does not grant access to low-level components of the OS, anti-cheat or DRM software can't run even on Windows — and that's exactly what's changing with the advent of RTX Spark.

In a briefing attended by Tom's Hardware, the company confirmed the challenge of native ARM anti-cheat and said it is working to bring support for Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, Denuvo, and more. While the games themselves will still be emulated, the anti-cheat software can run natively, allowing the games to boot. "Today, native anti-cheat solutions from partners like Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye, expanded Prism emulator compatibility, and XBOX PC app support means players will have access to a deep catalog of Windows PC games," a Windows blog announcement stated.

If these developers decide to release native Arm versions of their games, then we'll see an even bigger improvement for the platform, but that's not happening today.

To be clear, this is a joint effort between Microsoft, Nvidia, and the game studios, so don't expect Linux to get any better; across Arm and x86, Windows is the unifier. You may be wondering why something like this didn't happen with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series, and the answer is rather straightforward. Those devices simply weren't popular enough to warrant such a massive investment.

Realistically speaking, Nvidia is the only company in the world with enough leverage and resources to be able to pull off a transition like this. It can convince developers to port their anti-cheat software just so it can work on the fancy new chip. That being said, Epic Games did add native ARM64 support for Snapdragon X devices last year, but that's an exception to the rule since it was limited to only Fortnite.

Intel is taking Nvidia’s RTX Spark SoC range seriously. Tom’s Hardware sat down with Nish Neelalojanan, senior director of product management for Intel’s Client Computing Group, to get the company’s reaction to Nvidia’s new chips at Computex 2026. Rather than discrediting Nvidia’s new range, Neelalojanan says Intel is handling RTX Spark with “a healthy dose of paranoia,” while highlighting compatibility issues for Windows on Arm and the potentially high price point of Nvidia’s new platform.

“Nvidia puts out great products, right? And they know how to do gaming, they know how to do all these different things. So we always take everything with a healthy dose of paranoia, but we are also very, very confident with our products,” Neelalojanan told me. “When an Arm CPU enters a market, there’s going to be tons of compatibility, DRM issues, backwards compatibility, so as a result, we are very confident that we have the right CPU, GPU mix for clients, both for gaming and when it comes to what you call AI inference workloads.”

Although Qualcomm laid the groundwork for Windows on Arm, the momentum behind the company’s Snapdragon X range has leveled out. Both AMD and Intel have since released chips that deliver the same all-day battery life without the need to fuss with any Arm-to-x86 translation. Nvidia entering the market is a different beast, however. As one of the most valuable companies in the world and the clear forerunner in the AI space, Nvidia demands attention.

To that end, and for just one example of its commitment, Nvidia already revealed that Adobe is working on native Arm versions of Photoshop and Premiere Pro to support RTX Spark, a feat that Qualcomm has been unable to accomplish after two years on the market.

Given how much attention Nvidia demands, it makes sense that Intel is paying closer attention. The company is also in a strange position, as it rarely competes directly with Nvidia. Intel has made some inroads into consumer graphics with discrete GPUs like the Arc B580, and the top-end Arc B390 on Panther Lake is an impressive integrated part, but it hasn’t built anything to seriously challenge Nvidia’s dominance. And the companies continue to work together. Just this week, with the announcement of Xeon 6+ ‘Clearwater Forest’ CPUs, Intel highlighted its work with Nvidia in the data center.

Now, Intel has a direct mobile platform competitor in the form of Nvidia, which isn’t to be taken lightly. Even with that direct competition, Intel says it will continue to work with Nvidia, especially in the data center.

“Nvidia is a great partner. We will continue to work with them. You saw some of our announcements,” Neelalojanan told me. “We have some longer-term commitment with them, so both of us have different parts of the roadmap that we will expand together, there'll be [areas] where we will be partnering, and where there might be places where we will be competing, but I think it's great for the industry that there [are] different choices.”

Although compatibility is the main point of concern — Neelalojanan says “compatibility is going to be a key thing [with RTX Spark]” — pricing is another concern. Nvidia hasn’t revealed the starting configuration for RTX Spark, but given rising memory costs, higher-end configurations with a lot of memory will likely run several thousand dollars. Neelalojanan pointed to Wildcat Lake as an option for the budget market, which goes as low as 8 GB of single-channel memory.

We still have a few months before we see RTX Spark in action to evaluate how it compares to Intel’s Panther Lake, AMD’s Gorgon and Strix Point, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 chips. Nvidia says RTX Spark designs will arrive in the fall.

Along with its first-generation RTX Spark platform for desktop and laptop PCs, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company's commitment to future generations of those platforms on its future roadmaps. The company is committed to producing at least two additional generations of Spark platforms for its partners.

Beyond the Grace Blackwell RTX Spark chips (the top-end RTX Spark Superchip and an as-yet-undetailed smaller chip), Huang promised that every future generation of the company's platforms will include a Spark chip.

That means there will be a Vera Rubin pair of Sparks powered by LPDDR6 memory, and a future Rosa Feynman Spark with a presumably even faster (but as-yet unannounced) memory generation. That multi-generational promise is an important point of trust in Nvidia's commitment to transforming Windows PCs for the agentic AI era.

Building a full product and partner ecosystem is a much larger challenge than simply building and shipping a chip. It's clear that Nvidia has a small army of OEM partners ready to take those chips to market and a deep partnership with Microsoft and ISVs to unlock the capabilities of its platforms for Windows and the applications that run on it.

In order for those OEMs and software partners to trust that it's worth committing precious time and treasure to Nvidia's platform, Nvidia needs to demonstrate in turn that it's invested in shipping future generations of Sparks, as well. Publicly committing to this roadmap at Computex 2026 is an important demonstration that the Grace Blackwell RTX Spark is just the first step on a longer road rather than a momentary curiosity.

Indeed, during our pre-brief call last night, Nvidia was asked why its take on Windows on Arm is different compared to other companies' efforts to create alternative ecosystems to x86 mobile processors from AMD and Intel. Nvidia said that "[it's] investing a lot to make sure the Windows on Arm experience is great," and "the reason RTX Spark can succeed is because our full effort is behind this platform and bringing it to market."

Given Nvidia's position as the most valuable company in the world and its leading position not only as an AI hardware provider but a leading developer of high-quality open models and the entire underlying stack to run them, those are fighting words, to put it mildly. And while companies like Apple and AMD are building similar SoCs with powerful GPUs and large memory pools, they lack the broad software foundation that Nvidia has built on top of its products for partners to build with in turn.

In addition to these relatively low-power platforms, Nvidia will also be producing Windows on Arm-compatible versions of its DGX Station high-end desktop PC. The DGX Station is built around the GB300 Superchip, which encompasses a 72-core Grace CPU with 496 GB of LPDDR5X memory paired with a Blackwell Ultra GPU offering 252GB of HBM3e for a total of 748GB of coherent memory. The DGX Station offers up to 15 PFLOPS of FP4 performance without sparsity (or 20 PFLOPS for sparse workloads). Developers can further expand this system with another RTX Pro GPU over PCI Express.

Nvidia also committed to future DGX Stations for high-end Windows AI workstation performance. Although those systems will doubtless be far lower volume products than RTX Spark laptops and desktop mini-PCs, it further cements the company's full commitment to creating a reliable and durable ecosystem for partners to build around and consumers to buy into.

We're expecting to learn more about Nvidia's RTX Spark systems and ecosystem this week at Computex 2026. Stay tuned for more details.

Intel has confirmed several details about its next-generation Xeon 7 CPUs, codenamed Diamond Rapids, which are now officially slated to launch in 2027. Announcing its E-core-only Xeon 6+ chips at Computex, Intel teased that Diamond Rapids will support PCIe 6.0, pack 50% more cores than Xeon 6, and double the memory bandwidth. Intel is building Diamond Rapids chips on the Intel 18A-P node, which is a refined version of 18A that Intel demoed just last month.

Although Intel never formally announced a release window for Xeon 7, we originally expected to see the chips this year – a timeframe that became increasingly unlikely as news about Diamond Rapids dried up. Now, Intel has officially confirmed Diamond Rapids is arriving next year, meaning AMD will have a head start with its next-gen EPYC Venice CPUs built on the Zen 6 architecture, which are still (at the moment) slated for release this year.

Like Venice, Intel has confirmed Diamond Rapids will support PCIe 6.0, as well as double the memory bandwidth of Granite Rapids. Last year, Intel confirmed it canceled an 8-channel memory variant of Diamond Rapids to focus exclusively on the 16-channel design. Granite Rapids-AP (12-channel) topped out at 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth, while Granite Rapids-SP (8-channel) topped out at 409 GB/s. Depending on the comparison point — Intel didn’t clarify — you’re looking at topline memory bandwidth of at least 1.2 TB/s or 818 GB/s, respectively. Second-generation MRDIMM support, however, means that bandwidth could climb to upwards of 1.6 TB/s.

We can do similar math with core counts, looking at the top-end 6980P from Granite Rapid-AP at 128 cores. A 50% increase in core count brings us to 192 cores. Diamond Rapids has been rumored to climb up to 256 cores, with a 512-core dense version planned later. Intel is suggesting those rumors are false, though no hard specifications are confirmed yet.

The big question is what microarchitecture those cores will use, and if they’ll support Hyper-Threading. Intel removed Hyper-Threading from the Lion Cove P-cores in Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake, and kept it out of the Cougar Cove P-cores in Panther Lake. Naturally, if Xeon 7 uses either of those P-core microarchitectures, we’d also expect the chips to lack Hyper-Threading. Adding to the speculation were some comments Intel made in its January earnings call, where it said that it “will also reintroduce multi-threading back into our data center road map.”

Recently, however, Intel documents have suggested Diamond Rapids will use Panther Cove, an as-of-yet unreleased microarchitecture. We should know for sure what’s going on under the hood of Diamond Rapids soon. "We expect to share more on Diamond Rapids in the late summer at Hot Chips, so stay tuned there,” an Intel spokesperson shared in a Q&A with Tom’s Hardware.

Perhaps the most significant reveal in this tease is that Diamond Rapids is using Intel 18A-P. We’ve known for a while that the first 18A CPUs in the data center would be Xeon 6+, which Intel has now officially launched. 18A-P is a revision of 18A, but Intel has already demonstrated that it’s quite a significant revision.

Intel claims 18A-P delivers 9% higher performance at the same power as 18A, or an 18% power reduction at the same performance level. Intel says it also improved reliability and tweaked voltage behavior, making 18A-P a much more mature revision of 18A, likely in a bid to attract external customers for Intel Foundry.

Intel is facing off against AMD’s Zen 6 Venice CPUs, which we expect to learn more about at AMD’s Advancing AI event in July. So far, AMD has confirmed that Venice will launch with up to 256 cores, 1.6 TB/s of memory bandwidth per socket, and a 70% jump in gen-on-gen performance. There’s still a lot we don’t know about Venice and Diamond Rapids, but from the initial teases, Team Red is looking like the leader.

That would make sense. Although Diamond Rapids is a significant release for Intel, the company has continually reiterated the importance of Coral Rapids, the generation that will follow Xeon 7 on Intel’s road map. We expect to see Coral Rapids in 2028, featuring SMT, and Intel has said that it’s looking into ways to accelerate the Coral Rapids rollout.

Intel is returning to the data center with Xeon 6+, now harnessing the power of Intel 18A. After revealing Xeon 600 chips for workstations earlier in the year, Intel is turning back to the data center with Xeon 6+, an E-core-only design previously known as Clearwater Forest. The flagship Xeon 6990E+ is designed for compute density, packing in 288 Darkmont cores with 576 MB of L3 cache, with support for dual-socket systems, taking the core count up to 576. Intel claims the 6990E+ delivers an average 30% performance per thread improvement compared to AMD’s 192-core Epyc 9965, as well as up to 30% better power efficiency.

We’ve heard a lot about Clearwater Forest leading up to this launch, including a full architectural deep dive from Intel last year. As a refresher, Xeon 6+ is the culmination of Intel’s disaggregated approach to processor design over the past several generations, using a mixture of nodes and packaging techniques to achieve such high core density. On top of the silicon stack are 12 CPU chiplets built on Intel 18A, each packing 24 Darkmont E-cores without Hyper-Threading. They sit on three base tiles that hold the L3 cache and memory, which are built using Intel 3. Sandwiching this stack are two I/O chiplets built on Intel 7. Bringing the chiplets together are 12 EMIB 2.5D tiles, which are silicon bridges built directly into the substrate.

Outside of the chips, Xeon 6+ chips work with existing Xeon 6 platforms on the LGA 7529 socket (the same as Granite Rapids-AP). Intel supports both single and dual-socket systems, and with support for up to 12 channels of DDR5, running at up to 8000MT/s and 96 lanes of PCIe 5.0 (64 lanes of CXL). Those platform specs are for a single-socket system.

The chips come with a range of acronym-adorned hardware accelerators, including Intel QAT (QuickAssist Technology), DLB (Dynamic Load Balancer), DSA (Data Streaming Accelerator), and IAA (In-memory Analytics Accelerator). The flagship 6990E+ comes with 16 total accelerators, four for each type included in the architecture. Intel also expanded the chips with instructions to accelerate the SHA-512, SM3, and SM4 cryptographic algorithms, along with more robust confidential computing capabilities through Intel SGX for application isolation and Intel TDX for VM isolation.

New for Xeon 6+ CPUs is Intel Application Energy Telemetry, or AET. It’s a hardware-based telemetry tool that Intel says can provide insight on energy usage for “workloads, microservices, containers, VMS, applications and even on an individual software thread-level when desired.” Xeon 6+ CPUs are the first to support AET, and Intel says it will be available on Xeon processors going forward, specifically targeting data center providers.

Although there was some hope we’d see Intel’s long-awaited AVX10.2 with Xeon 6+, that isn’t the case. The CPUs don’t support any form of AVX10, or even AVX-512. They top out at AVX2, an Intel spokesperson confirmed to Tom’s Hardware.

Intel Xeon 6+ ‘Clearwater Forest’ specs

Intel has four Xeon 6+ designs and six SKUs total, with the top two models in the stack coming in power-limited configurations with lower base and all-core turbo speeds, but otherwise identical specs.

Before getting into the individual processors, there are some specs shared across the entire range:

• 12-channel memory at up to DDR5-8000
• Single- or dual-socket compatibility
• 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes, 64 CXL 2.0 lanes, and 6 UPI 2.0 lanes
• 1024 Intel TDX keys per CPU
• Up to 16 accelerators (four each for Intel QAT, DLB, DSA, and IAA)
• Intel AET

Compared to last-gen Sierra Forest chips, the spec that immediately stands out is TDP. With Sierra Forest, Intel topped out at 330W on the Xeon 6780E and went down as low as 205W on the 6710E. Now, 300W is the floor and 450W is the ceiling, bringing it into closer alignment with top-end TDPs from AMD’s EPYC range. As usual, however, TDP only hints at real-world power consumption, which can vary widely depending on numerous factors.

Core counts have jumped massively, as expected, but so has the amount of L3 cache. The 6990E+ has more than five times the amount of L3 cache as the 6780E. Even the 6960E+, which has 144 cores like the 6780E, has four times as much L3 cache. L2 cache remains unchanged, however. Intel is using 4MB of L2 cache per cluster of four cores. That cache is technically shared among those cores in a cluster, but you can think of it as 1MB of L2 cache per core.

Intel Xeon 6+ ‘Clearwater Forest’ performance and benchmark claims

Intel shared a variety of benchmarks for Xeon 6+, comparing the new flagship Xeon 6990E+ to last-gen Intel chips, as well as AMD’s current EPYC offerings. Overall, Intel claims a generational improvement of 2.26x compared to the Xeon 6780E, as well as 30% higher performance per thread compared to AMD’s EPYC 9965.

Starting with the generational improvement, it’s no surprise to see such a massive uplift in performance. After all, Intel is comparing the Xeon 6990E+ to a CPU that has half the threads and a 120W haircut on TDP. The Xeon 6780E that Intel is comparing its latest Xeon 6+ chip to is the flagship from the last-gen Sierra Forest range, however. On average, Intel claims a 2.26x uplift, and as you can see from Intel’s internal benchmarks, the Xeon 6990E+ offered more than double the performance of the Xeon 6780E across every workload Intel tested.

The more important metric here is performance per watt, however. The Xeon 6990E+ has a much higher TDP and denser compute, but Intel still claims an average efficiency improvement of 55%, ranging from a 30% uplift in the Stream Triad memory bandwidth benchmark up to a 79% improvement in Linpack. For these benchmarks, Intel used a mixture of dual-socket and single-socket systems, matching the configuration for the specific test (i.e. using two dual-socket or two single-socket systems rather than mixing and matching). You can see the exact configuration details in the full slide deck at the end of this article.

Given Team Red’s inroads into the data center over the last several generations, the competitive performance is perhaps more important. Intel says that the Xeon 6990E+ delivers 30% higher performance per thread, on average, compared to the EPYC 9965, as well as 30% higher average performance per thread per watt. Per-thread performance is important, absolutely, but Intel doesn’t have any data comparing average performance across the entire die to AMD’s offerings.

That’s likely due to overall thread count. Although Intel packs 288 cores in the Xeon 6990E+ compared to the EPYC 9965’s 192, AMD uses simultaneous multithreading, while Intel doesn’t. A per-thread advantage usually doesn’t directly translate to an overall performance advantage. It’s just one metric that could be important depending on the workloads you’re running. According to Intel’s benchmarks, Xeon 6+ holds around a 30% advantage in integer and floating-point throughput, and around a 38% improvement in efficiency.

Although Intel restricted hard numbers to the performance-per-thread metric, it provided a small glimpse at overall efficiency compared to the competition. At 40% CPU utilization, Intel claims the 6990E+ is up to 30% more efficient than the EPYC 9965. Assuming this chart is accurate and not some skewed visualization (that’s possible), you can see efficiency get much tighter as utilization increases.

Intel doesn’t have benchmarks comparing Xeon 6+ to designs based on the ARM instruction set, which is becoming an important comparison point. Just recently, we saw the first benchmarks of Nvidia’s Vera CPU break cover. The company, however, says that it thinks “[Xeon 6+] compares very favorably" to ARM-based options.

Full Intel Computex 2026 Xeon 6+ presentation

AMD confirmed that it will support its current AM5 socket through 2029 at Computex 2026. Previously, AMD had only committed to support the socket through 2027. With the extended timeline and AMD’s usual release cadence, support through 2029 should mean we’ll see at least two more generations on the socket as AMD continues to fight for slots among the best CPUs for gaming.

We first saw the AM5 socket with the release of Ryzen 7000 CPUs with the Zen 4 architecture in 2022. At the time, AMD said it would support the socket through “2025+.” With the release of Zen 5 in 2024, AMD extended the window to “2027+.” Now, we’re getting another two-year bump, though without Zen 6 CPUs in hand. We expect to see them soon, however, as AMD continues to double down on Zen 6 arriving in the data center this year.

Now, the support window is extended through “2029,” notably without a plus. That may seem like a small difference, but as you can see from AMD’s own slides, it uses “2027+” right next to “2029.” We’ve reached out to AMD to confirm if 2029 is the end of the line for AM5. A company spokesperson responded with the following: "AMD is unable to comment on future products/roadmap."

Still, two more generations on AM5, at least, seems likely. With Zen 6 set to arrive later this year in the data center, we should have a new generation on AM5 at some point next year. Assuming another two-year cycle for AMD’s following generation, that means AM5 would go out in 2029 with Zen 7, which we currently expect to see in 2028 (though that timeline could easily change as consumer launches move around in the AI era).

EXPO Ultra Low Latency, with promised 4% uplift coming soon

In addition to extending AM5 support, AMD teased a new version of EXPO automatic memory overclocking feature. EXPO Ultra Low Latency (ULL) is a new version of AMD’s branded memory overclocking that promises an average 4% uplift in performance compared to the first version of EXPO, as well as a 13% jump compared to running DDR5 at JEDEC speeds. AMD hasn’t confirmed when EXPO ULL will launch, outside of the fact that it’s “coming soon” and will be available from several memory partners, including G.Skill, Kingston, V-Color, Teamgroup, Lexar, and XPG.

AMD is bringing two X3D CPUs to market in a bid to combat rising component prices. The long-rumored Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition arrives next month with a recommended retail price of $349, $100 less than the CPU launched for more than four years ago. For AM5 users, AMD has the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, which is a downclocked version of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D (still one of the best CPUs for gaming) with eight Zen 4 cores, launching at $329.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is, surprisingly, the star of the show. At the beginning of the year, AMD shared first with Tom’s Hardware its plans to bring back AM4 options as prices on DDR5 for the AM5 platform continue to rise. Supply of AMD’s sought-after AM4 options, such as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, have largely dried up, with resellers demanding as much as $800 for the CPU.

The specs remain unchanged, at least based on what AMD has shared so far. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition comes with eight Zen 3 cores and 16 threads, a maximum 4.5 GHz boost clock, 100 MB of combined L2 and L3 cache, and a 105W TDP. Just like the original version, the multiplier is locked, so you can't manually overclock the chip. It also uses AMD's first-gen 3D V-Cache design, with the SRAM placed on top of the cores.

AMD shared a handful of benchmarks comparing the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to older AM4 CPUs. Compared to the Ryzen 7 2700X, there’s a 115% uplift; against the Ryzen 7 3700X, a 47% jump. And against the base Ryzen 7 5800X, there’s an average 16% uplift. These are all familiar numbers for us at this point. We’ve seen the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in action for more than four years, and even with first-gen 3D V-Cache, it’s one fast gaming CPU.

Interestingly, AMD also compared the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to the Core i9-14900K, both running with DDR4 memory at 3600 MT/s. AMD claims the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is 10% faster on average at 1080p. We’ll have to run back some benchmarks to verify these claims; with DDR5, at least, even the Core i9-13900K is faster than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D based on our CPU benchmark hierarchy.

AMD says the Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition will be available for sale on June 25, starting at $349. In addition to a new box with a 10th anniversary logo, the chip comes bundled with a Carbice Ice Pad, a thermal pad created with carbon nanotubes that’s normally only available through CyperPowerPC’s build configurator.

New (or at least newer) for AMD is the Ryzen 7 7700X3D. As the name suggests, this is an 8-core / 16-thread chip using 3D V-Cache and the Zen 4 architecture. It’s a downclocked version of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, sporting the same TDP, number of cores, and total amount of cache, just with slightly tweaked clock speeds.

The base clock is down from 4.2 GHz on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D to 4 GHz on the 7700X3D, and the boost clock tops out at 4.5 GHz (5 GHz for the 7800X3D). We’ve seen this playbook from AMD before with the Ryzen 7 5700X3D, rereleasing an older CPU with a worse bin at a lower price. And given the state of component pricing right now, that’s not a bad thing.

AMD didn’t share any performance data for the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, though we’ve asked the company if it has any broad performance claims for the new chip; the company says we should see more near launch. We expect the chip to perform largely the same as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, however. With X3D CPUs, in particular, even large jumps in clock speed amount to very little extra performance in games, as you can read about in our Ryzen 7 9850X3D review.

Performance for the Ryzen 7 7700X3D is important, as it’s being flanked by two other excellent gaming CPUs around the same price. From AMD’s camp, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is $230 and provides 95% of the gaming performance of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D on average; the Ryzen 7 7700X3D will likely slot somewhere in between. From Intel’s side, there’s the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus at the same price as the Ryzen 7 7700X3D. Intel is still about 10% off the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in games, but it’s more than twice as fast in application performance.

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D arrives after the Ryzen 7 5800X3D on July 16, starting at $329. Assuming similar gaming performance as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, that’s not a bad price. Although the lowest sale price for the 7800X3D is technically $320, the CPU has almost exclusively sold for above $350, sale or not.

Full AMD Computex 2026 presentation

It's finally happening — Nvidia is set to launch the N1 family of SoCs at Computex tomorrow after years of it being stuck in the rumor mill. And just a day before the grand reveal, most of the specs for the lineup have leaked, courtesy of Videocardz. As expected, there seem to be two distinct SKUs: N1 and N1X, both targeting different performance and price levels. Take the following information with a grain of salt since it comes from documents dating back to 2024.

We begin with the standard N1 that reportedly comes in two configs. There's a 12-core (8+4) model with 2,560 CUDA cores and a 10-core (7+3) model with 2,048 CUDA cores. Either variant comes with 8x PCIe 5.0 lanes and 3x PCIe 4.0 lanes; the base N1 supports up to two M.2 SSDs. Memory support tops out at 64GB across 8x LPDDR5X channels. In terms of power budget, we're looking at 18W-45W TDPs.

Then there's the more exciting N1X that, at the top-end, is identical to the GB10 found in Nvidia's DGX Spark mini-PC, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang already confirmed. There are two SKUs for this SoC as well: a full-fat 20-core (10+10) monster with 6,144 CUDA Cores — same as the desktop RTX 5070 — and an 18-core (9+9) variant with 5,120 CUDA Cores. Both chips have the same power envelope of 45W-80W.

N1X will reportedly start at 16GB LPPDR5X configs, but the platform can support up to 128GB across 16 channels. We don't know at what speeds exactly yet, but a previous leak suggested these chips are operating at 8,533 MT/s, which would make the RAM config faster than AMD's Strix Halo. The N1X also has 12x PCIe 5.0 lanes and 5x PCIe 4.0 lanes capable of accepting up to three M.2 SSDs.

All signs point toward Nvidia unveiling the N1/N1X family tomorrow, so we should know all about these chips very soon. Based on the history of leaks and rumors, and educated guesses, these specs make sense. Once made official, Nvidia would re-enter the laptop market, directly competing with AMD, Intel, and, of course, Apple. We say re-enter because the company already tried selling ARM-based PC chips back in 2011.

The advent of a new mainstream SoC from Nvidia could open doors to exciting handhelds, OEM PCs, and perhaps even a refreshed Shield TV that fans have been yearning for forever. It's a positive development considering just how abandoned consumers and, in particular, gamers have felt these past few years, but it all comes down to pricing. And during a RAM crisis, that's not going to be ideal.

N1X will likely target the $2,000+ market, competing with the MacBook Pro, but the N1 could be an exciting midrange option under $1,500.