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The Intel Nova Lake rumors are stacking up quickly now, and the latest leak appears to reveal that Intel will be skipping the Core Ultra 300 naming convention entirely on the desktop, and instead jump straight to Intel Core Ultra 400 branding for its next-gen Nova Lake gaming CPU range. This would also mean that rumored Intel Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs will be sticking to the existing Core Ultra 200 naming scheme used by Intel’s current chips.
This wouldn’t be the first time Intel has skipped a whole numbering system on the desktop. The whole Core Ultra 100 series, based on the Meteor Lake architecture, also skipped the desktop and only appeared in mobile CPUs. Intel’s existing Core Ultra 200 CPUs, as we found in our Core Ultra 7 265K review, struggle to compete with AMD in our guide to buying the best gaming CPU, and Intel may want to use its branding to represent a clean break between its new CPUs and its existing chips.
This latest rumor comes from a mocked-up roadmap posted by serial tech leaker momomo_us on X (formerly Twitter), which shows a timeline for when to expect Intel and AMD’s new CPU architectures, along with some of their model names. According to the roadmap, the Core Ultra 300 branding will be used exclusively for Intel’s Panther Lake CPUs, which it says will come out in the first half of 2026, while Arrow Lake is shown only using the Core Ultra 200 branding.
The latter period extends to the end of 2026, which we assume implies that the rumored Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs also won’t be using the Core Ultra 300 naming scheme, as previously speculated, and will instead use different 200-series numbers. Intel has done this before with refreshes based on the same architecture, as we saw with the Devil’s Canyon refresh of its Haswell chips back in 2014, when the Core i7-4790K took over from the previous 4770K, with the same core spec and a higher clock speed.
According to the image posted by momomo_us, we won’t be seeing the first Intel Nova Lake CPUs, using the Core Ultra 400 naming scheme, until 2027. Recent shipping records appear to show a 28-core Intel Nova Lake pre-QS CPU sample already shipping for testing, but there’s always a long gap between early test samples being issued and large-scale production ready to roll out of the fabrication plant.
Earlier Nova Lake leaks have also pointed to an Intel 3D V-cache equivalent that could help Intel take on AMD’s X3D chips, with one chip potentially even having 3x the L3 cache of the 9800X3D. All of this is just rumor and speculation, though, and we’ll have to wait for the official announcement from Intel before we know anything about Nova Lake for sure.
In the meantime, have a read of our guide to buying the best gaming motherboard if you’re thinking of upgrading now, as well as our best CPU cooler guide, so you can keep your CPU’s temperature in check and avoid clock speed throttling.
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