The Next 4 GENERATIONS of Intel CPUs EXPLAINED

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]The next four years of Intel's CPUs, their whole road map has just been leaked. By Moore's law is dead. I'll give you that. This may or may not be true. So, take everything we're saying today with a grain of salt. But, I'm going to break down the next four generations of Intel CPUs, the multi-core performance, the IPC gains, and the gaming performance on what little information we know now. I'm giving you my estimates and going over exactly what we're going to be seeing out of Intel for these next four generations. So, let's get into it. As you all know, the first generation is going to be Noval Lake, and this is going to start a new LGA1 1954 socket, blah blah blah. This socket's going to be supported for the next three generations, not four, because, well, one of these generations of CPUs that we previously thought would be on desktop has now moved to exclusively mobile.

[00:00:50]That is Titan Lake. Titan Lake will not be on desktop for uh LGA1 1954. It's just going to be a mobile CPU in 2028.

[00:00:58]Nova Lake may actually be the best time to upgrade out of all of these CPU generations just because I think that it's going to get you most of the performance from these generations. And let me explain why. Nova Lake will be giving us 52 cores, 48 actually real cores. There's four LP cores. And this is doubling the amount of cores we had over the previous generation Aerol Lakeake. And this is just going to be the biggest upgrade for people looking for more multi-core performance. Also, Nova Lake's bringing in BLLC or big last level cache that is going to give us huge increases in gaming performance and fully feed that 52 cores here even though we're still in dual channel mode with only you know probably around 130 to 140 maybe 150 GB of memory bandwidth total which if you know anything that's not a lot for 52 cores. So, the cache system is going to have to be very robust on this 52 core monster. But I think that Nova Lake will probably be one of the best times to upgrade just because you're getting on this new socket. You're going to be able to upgrade if you want. You're getting all the cores right up front. You're getting the gaming performance. And I think Nova Lake is going to get us most the way there compared to these other generations. But we'll talk a little bit more about these other generations. So, we know about Nova Lake. I've done countless videos about it. all kinds of new architectures, new tiles, new ARIG GPU, new NPU if you care about that thing, new memory controller, and yeah, it's going to be a huge upgrade and it's coming later this year, 2026, fall 2026, we're getting Nova Lake. But just to go over what I've laid out on Nova Lake, I think it's going to have 10% more IPC than Aerolake. It's probably going to have about 80 to 100% more multi-core performance just because, you know, it has double the amount of cores. And that's going to put you right around 70 to 80,000 points in Cinebench R23.

[00:02:47]Okay, so that's absolutely massive. The 270K right now gets like 42,000 45,000 in Cinebench R23. So we're looking right around doubling that somewhere, maybe even a little 80% if you can't cool the thing. I'm going to go with a conservative estimate of about 80% more multi-core over the 270K just because this thing's going to be very difficult to cool with proper cooling.

[00:03:10]Yeah, get double the performance easily.

[00:03:11]As for gaming, the BLLC variant is going to be seriously good at gaming with its huge cache reservoir, although there's going to be more and more cores that which does increase latency. And we're going to a two tile uh compute died design, which will also increase latency. So, I'm not sure. I'm going to say an average of 25% gain over the 270K right now in gaming performance, which hey, I think that's pretty good. could be higher than that, especially in certain games that fit in the cache, but I'm going to say 25%. If you're wondering, that's actually going to come out before Zen6. Zen 6 will probably come out in the first half of 2027. I would have guessed somewhere in the springtime, maybe not right at January, but you pro maybe around March. And that's just because it was delayed. It was supposed to come out in fall. Um, but they were just behind schedule on Zen 6 a little bit. And not because it's not ready. I think it's ready. I think it's just that they're using that 2nmter silicon first for their data centers and that's very smart by AMD. I would do the same thing. So after Nova Lake, we're going to have Razer Lake, which Nova Lake is going to be built on 2nmter tsnc 2 nanometer. That's what it looks like.

[00:04:20]Razor Lake is actually kind of rumored to be built on 14A, but I'm seriously doubting this because well, Razer Lake is supposed to be a quick turnaround from Nova Lake of 2027. Right after we get Nova Lake in 2026, we're going to get Razer Lake. And Razer Lake's actually more like a tick. It's not a talk. Nova Lake is a talk. If you know of Intel's kind of strategy or their previous strategy for releasing CPUs, you would have a tick and a talk. And a tick is just kind of like a reiteration of a CPU architecture kind of like uh Raptor Lake was over Alderlake where a talk is a big huge revolution like Alder Lake was over 11th gen Rocket Lake. So yeah, Razer Lake is kind of more of just like slightly iterating on Nova Lake. I personally think it's going to bring power consumption down um and allow you to get more multi-core performance. It's going to be on the same 1954 platform. I think it's going to have 52 core still.

[00:05:17]We aren't getting a core bump. All the other platform tiles based on what Moore's law is dead said, there's going to be the same ARC iGPU tile. There's going to be the same NPU memory controller, maybe slightly tweaked memory controller. The weird thing is it's they think it's going to be built on 14A, which I don't think is ready yet. And this is supposed to come out in 2027, just one year after Nova Lake, and I'm kind of doubtful. I'm doubtful on this a little bit. I don't think we're going to see that um on 14A. I think if they're going to use 14A, it might be in the lower-end SKs like later after launch. And we're probably still going to be using TSMC. Maybe TSMC uh 16A or whatever they're going to be having. I don't know. But 2027 seems pretty soon for something like this or on Intel 14A. And if if it that does come out, it'll probably be delayed. As for Razer Lake, just because it's that small tweak in the architecture, probably 5% more IPC than Nova Lake, 10% more multi-core performance, mainly just from getting a little bit more efficient with the cooling, with the power consumption on a new node. And that puts you around 80 to 90,000 points in Cinebench R23. And with some overclocking here with the Razer Lake architecture, you could probably get 100,000 points in Cinebench R23, which I I think that's absolutely insane. With proper cooling, this thing's going to rip as well. Although, it's really not a huge upgrade for buyers of Nova Lake.

[00:06:41]You wouldn't really probably upgrade to Razor Lake just cuz it's a small little tick. It's a small little uh tweak to the architecture. Same amount of cores.

[00:06:50]Yeah, it it is what it is. If it costs more, it's kind of like not that exciting, right? And I think this is going to have about 5 to 10% more gaming performance than Nova Lake. And that's going to put it right around 35% faster than the 270K in gaming. Now, there is this mobile architecture of Nova Lake that includes a huge ARC iGPU. I made a whole video about it. It's called Nova Lake AX. Okay, so Moors laws Dead kind of updated us on this architecture. He's saying it's not cancelled, which seems about right. If you're going to develop all this R&D cost, why cancel the thing?

[00:07:24]Especially with ARC being as good as it is now. And the performance has been updated. My performance estimates on Novake AX because he's saying it's a 32 XE core GPU now. And well, from the leak I saw, it was a 48 XE core GPU. I think that's going to drop the performance down quite a bit. We're probably sitting around 3070 Ti performance now desktop performance where before I was estimating RTX 5070 3090 desktop performance for this mobile iGPU but that I mean it's going to be huge. I still think RTX 2080 Ti desktop 3070Ti is still good for this uh GPU, but yeah, it's it's not as good as it could have been. I think for RTX 5070 performance, what you would have been able to get with this thing, you would have basically been able to ride off all other performance tiers of GPUs. But yeah, this thing could come out in 2027, maybe late 2027 next year. So, we'll see if that comes out. It's very interesting and it could be uh Intel's last very big iGPU just because they're going to be partnering with Nvidia after that. But if it's successful, maybe Intel will continue to do that. Who knows? So, we have Razer Lake in 2027 and then Titan Lake is going to be a mobile lake architecture and that's in 2028. And Titan Lake is huge. It's actually going to be a very big talk moment for Intel because we're moving away from PC cores.

[00:08:55]We're moving away from ECores and we're going to unified core which actually is just an iteration of the ECorg to be my full understanding of it. And that's just because we squeezed all the juice we can out of uh pores by now. That architecture is a little long in the tooth. It's a little old and ees are just better. There's more IPC left to gain in the tank from ECores. So that's why we're moving to them. And yeah, it's Titan Lake's only going to have ecores or unified core, which they're going to be really freaking powerful by then. And this is the first generation that's going to have this integrated Nvidia GPU. So, you better know I'm going to be looking to upgrade my laptop when it comes around this time in 2028 if the Lunar Lake laptop's no longer doing it for me. And I I find myself wanting to game mobile more. But this thing, it's going to be crazy, man. We're going to have Cooper Shark. That's the identification for these unified cores.

[00:09:54]Kind of how we have Lion Code PC cores now. They're going to be called Cooper Shark unified cores or just performance cores or Cooper Shark cores. That's I guess what they're called. And I'm thinking these things are going to have 10 to 15% gain in performance over um Razor Lakes PE cores. Although, you know, maybe we're just going to get like 5% or 0% gain, but it's now a unified, more efficient core. I could see that as well. But I'm just going to say 10 to 15%. I think this is going to be a great architecture, and I think that's going to put you at around 5% more gaming than Razer Lake. However, this is going to be a mobile architecture, right? So, we're going to be getting equal gaming performance to Razer Lake or better, slightly better, but on mobile. Okay?

[00:10:42]Okay, so it's pretty cool. Titan Link's going to be an awesome architecture and the highest end core count variant for this thing, I think, will be 50% less performance than the highest core count of Razer Lake, but you're mobile. So, you're going to be getting around 40 to 45K in Cineage R23 with Titan Lake, but in a mobile laptop form factor, which is actually equal to the 270K we have now.

[00:11:05]Uh, that uses like 250 watts to get there, but you're going to be doing it mobiley, which is, I think, awesome.

[00:11:11]Another important thing to note is with Titan Lake, for the first time, Intel's going to be giving us an 8p core, zero ecore CPU, or really just 8 e ecore CPU because these are the iteration of ecores, but they will be ding-dong fast by then. And this is really what people wanted for gaming. You know, it's going to be great. And I'm predicting that the Nvidia G iGPU with these products will be anywhere from an RTX 2070 performance desktop to RTX 2080 Ti performance, but these are going to be much smaller GPUs than something like Nova Lake AX. And they're going to be more efficient with DLSS technologies, probably the newest generation of RTX in here. So, for all intents and purposes, it's going to be an absolute banger. And this is the laptop upgrade I would be looking for.

[00:11:58]If you want to buy a laptop right now, buy a low-end one and wait for this.

[00:12:03]Don't buy a high-end laptop because this is going to absolutely destroy it. Okay, so we had Titan Link in 2028. Now we're heading to Hammer Lake. Hammer Lake.

[00:12:13]Well, this is going to be the end of the road map for now. And as far as we know, it's going to be the end of Intel CPUs on LG 1954, unless they wisen up and decide, hey, let's just support this thing for even longer. Although, one limitation of this socket is it's limited to DDR5, and that doesn't look like it's going to change. It looks like we're using DDR5 all the way up here to Hammer Lake, which is going to come out in probably 2030, maybe 2029, probably 2030. And it could be using Intel 14A, could be using Intel 10A or 7A, if those are things, or TSMC, but I leaks right now are pointing to Intel 14A, which I guess sounds about right. And this CPU is just going to be an absolute beast because we're on the second gen of Unified Core and Hyperthreading's returning here. So this is going to be huge for Intel and client and data center because they really need that hyperthreaded advantage for even more multi-core performance and AI workloads.

[00:13:20]And these cores are called Thunderhawk, which I think is really cool. I think that's a cool name. And you know, we're still unified core. No pores, no E cores. However, there is this version of cores that Moors laws dead is talking about that is kind of like a cut down pore. If you know about Ryzen, they have these things called dense cores and or classic cores and then what are they called? Dense. Yeah, I think classic and dense. And the dense cores have like a little bit less cache in them. Uh they don't clock as fast. So for an all intents of purposes, they're kind of an ecore. However, they still support all the instruction sets and they're they're they're better than ecores because they're slightly cut down, but they take up less space. Intel is wanting to do that same thing. So technically they really aren't getting rid of EC cores completely. They're just reworking how they they actually go about producing the EC cores and designing them. And we're kind of just getting re rid of pecores altogether and just going with the ecore design. So we have these Thunderhawk cores and Mors laws dead is out actually out here saying like there's going to be an absolutely core battle between Intel and AMD at this time. He thinks AMD is going to be upping core counts to 64 cores by this time, maybe 32 core chiplets or at least something like 24 core chiplets with 48 total zen cores by 2030 here. And he thinks Intel is going to respond bigly with um Hammer Lake. And you know, he didn't give us the exact core number. He threw some ideas out there. However, I did the math and I said, "Hey, what if we had a total of 68 cores or 32 cores per uh compute tile, then we had four LPE cores on the SOC tile." Kind of what we're doing now. Instead of 24 cores per compute tile, we would have 32 cores per compute tile. A total of 68 cores. And I said, "Yeah, I think Hammer Lake could have 68 cores total in 2030." unified core architecture, you know, Thunderhawk cores, 68 of them. And this would give us 25% more multi-threaded performance over Razer Lake, just around that level.

[00:15:37]And you're looking at 100,000 to 110,000 points in Cineage R23. Now, that's a big if if that's going to translate to real world because you actually have to keep these cores fed for that to work. And if we're still on a dual channel RAM interface with 68 cores, I don't know.

[00:15:57]You're going to have to have a pretty heavy cache system at that point. More BLC than uh than even we're going to have with Nova Lake. Maybe like 1 GBTE of total cash or something and then maybe you could make it work. But it is absolutely insane to see where the future's going. And me personally, I have 24 cores now, and I don't know if I really need any more to be honest with you. I want more for bigger number, better in benchmarks, but for my workflow with editing videos, I really don't think I need more than 24. I think these Thunderhawk cores could see about 5 to 10% gain over Titan Lake and IPC.

[00:16:32]And in gaming, I think we'd see about 10% more performance over Razer Lake.

[00:16:36]Maybe 15, maybe 20 if we can push clock speeds. Who knows if we're going to get higher clock speeds by then, but this would put us somewhere around 50% maybe 60% more performance than something like a 270K, which is an already excellent CPU. In certain scenarios, of course, when you need a lot of cache, this system with hund, you know, hundreds of megabytes of cache compared to something like a 270K with not that much, maybe like what 40 megabytes, 36 megabytes, yeah, it's going to be closer to 2x the performance in gaming. over. I'm saying 60 to 70% gain with the end life of this socket three generations, four generations from now over Aerrow Lake, which hey, that's pretty good. That'd probably be, you know, 60% 70% gain over something like a 14900 K as well. So, just take that in mind. Like, do you want to buy Nova Lake right off the rip for however much performance it's going to give over the 14900K if you're on a Raptor Lake system? Do you want to buy something that's like 30% 35% faster with Nova Lake? Or do you want to wait for a few years until you finally get that 70% gain up to 2x gain in cash sensitive scenarios with Hammerlake? Me personally, just seeing this road map, seeing it lined out gives me confidence in Intel's future as a platform, and it makes me really excited to see what's going to go on with per um competition between AMD and Intel, dude. Like this is going to be a great few generations for CPUs and I'm looking forward to it.

[00:18:11]Like there's innovation coming on the mobile side with Nvidia GPUs and AMD very well might just be cooked for integrated graphics solutions considering that Intel iGPUs are going to get way better. And even if they don't get better, they have Nvidia iGPUs cooking for the next couple generations.

[00:18:30]So I'd be scared for integrated solutions if I was AMD. But other than that, I think AMD is going to be able to compete very well in gaming workloads for these next couple generations with their low latency uh architecture that they have cooking up. However, I think Intel is going to be solidly clearly the winner for workstation and multi-core performance for maybe the next four years. Like they're just going to have more cores. Their architecture is going to support scaling up more and more cores than AMD's will. So, we'll just have to wait and see how that goes. So, in conclusion, let me just summarize everything that I have laid out for my performance estimates. Nova Lake, we're going to be seeing about 1.8x the performance in multi-core over the 270K and about 1.25x in gaming over the 275K. That gaming performance estimate is intentionally low. Okay, Mors law is dead was saying in his recent video that Intel very well may just take everything with Noval Lake. They might they might destroy um Zen 5x3D. They're obviously going to destroy and multi-threaded and Zen 6 may just catch up with Nova Lake. Or hey, it could beat it in gaming. I personally think Zen 6 X3D will beat Nova Lake BLLC in gaming just because Nova Lake has too much cores. There's it's their first generation of dual tile. I I don't I'm not confident that they're just going to be able to pull that out with a huge W on the first try, but we'll have to see on that. And then with Razor Lake, which will be in 2027, one year after Nova Lake this year, we are going to see about an extra 10% gain in multi-threaded or that would be 2x the 270K on the low end. Two. So this is like what 80,000 90,000 points in Cinebench R23. Insane. Another 5 to 10% gain over Nova Lake. So, we're seeing about 35% gain over Aerolink or the 270K in gaming up to 45% gain right there. And then Titan Link, which is a mobile architecture, you're matching 270K multi-core performance in a mobile form factor. And you're also beating it in gaming by probably, you know, 25 30% uh over the 270K in gaming. Although, these are going to be paired with Nvidia iGPUs. So, you won't be pushing the CPU to its limit like you would on a desktop system. And then finally, we're getting Hammerlake 2029 to 2030. And this is going to have Thunderhawk unified cores, 68 cores, I believe we could be seeing with this system, giving us, oh my gosh, 2.4x the performance or 240% more performance than the 270K. You're looking at over 100,000 points in Cinebench R23 here. and also 10% gain performance over Razer Lake. So somewhere around 1.5 to 1.6x the performance over the 270K. And this is a very low estimate. I could see this going up to 1.7x. Even in some scenarios, close to 2x, maybe not exactly 2x, but in scenarios where you need a lot of cash, I could see that. So this is my estimates for Intel's next few generations of CPU sockets. And after you see this, you may understand why. like, hey, you may just want to upgrade to Nova Lake now and just ride out the rest of this whole socket just because, you know, Razer Lake is just a little bit of a tweak. And then we get uh what do you call it? Hammer Lake. And Hammer Lake does seem to be a big jump, but it won't be coming until years from now. So, I think if you buy high-end Nova Lake, you're going to be good for quite a while. As long as it doesn't cost like $1,500 for the BLC version, yeah, you're going to be sitting pretty with Nova Lake. So, let me know down below what you think of my estimates.

[00:22:12]I'm really excited to talk about this.

[00:22:14]So, let's start debating in the comments.