Thanks to a leaked shipping manifest, it looks like Intel may be sending early models of its upcoming Nova Lake CPUs to a select few. The notes on the shipping label suggest that the CPU in question was sent free of charge for research purposes, so it could have been sent to a potential customer for study. Nova Lake is the desktop follow-up to the Arrow Lake, which had an extraordinarily rocky start.
Unfortunately, the leaked image, which comes from X user X86deadandback by way of Tom’s Hardware, lacks any details on the chip itself. The date on the shipping manifest is Dec. 9, 2024. The “Test Chip I3 CPU” could refer to Core I3, but I3s don’t exist in the Arrow Lake lineup and aren’t expected to in the Nova Lake set, either. What seems most likely is that it’s just shorthand to denote a lower-end Nova Lake chip.
Intel hasn’t released much information about Arrow Lake CPUs. The chipmaker planned to use its own facilities to produce the chips (probably using the Intel 18A process) back when Pat Gelsinger was at the helm. Bringing production for Nova Lake in-house eliminates the extra cost that would be associated with having TSMC handle production. Now that Gelsinger is out, Intel’s deep-dive back into the foundry business could be on shaky ground, but Nova Lake seems far enough along that it, at least, looks likely to follow Gelsinger’s original plans for in-house manufacturing.

Credit: Intel
Nova Lake may be compatible with a different socket than Arrow Lake’s LGA 1851. That would make the LGA 1851 a very short-lived socket, but considering the difficulties that Arrow Lake went through, we think most buyers would be willing to cut bait and pick up a new board when they upgrade to Nova Lake (or, down the line, Razor Lake.)
It will be interesting to see whether Nova Lake or Razor Lake end up with memory on the die, like Lunar Lake. There’s no real expectation that Nova Lake will have it, given that Gelsinger panned that idea while discussing Lunar Lake last year. Lunar Lake’s onboard memory caused some excitement as AI took the world by storm and AMD trotted out its newly-redesigned X3D memory. We’ll have to see how Intel’s new leadership changes the CPU roadmap, if it does at all.