Friday, October 30th 2026
Intel Nova Lake-S Promises Up To 17% Single-Thread and 20% Gaming Performance Improvements
A lot of information relating to Intel Nova Lake-S has emerged leading up to the official launch in early 2027, including official information from Intel detailing the Nova Lake architecture and a recent benchmark leak that promised significant single-thread performance improvements on a 28-core Nova Lake-S part. However, a recent leak out of @Haze2K1 on X, shared by VideoCardz, purports that the real-world performance improvements for Intel's Nova Lake desktop CPUs are in the double digit range.
While the leaker has been around for a while, there is no guarantee that this information is accurate, since the only cited source is "circulating chatter," however, the claim is that Intel's Nova Lake will outperform comparable last-generation Arrow Lake CPUs by 8-17% in raw single-thread performance, 15% in general-purpose workloads, and up to 20% in gaming. There is some nuance to these claims, with the 17% improvement figure exclusive to the higher-end CPUs that feature bLLC, while the 17% boost allegedly comes from the implementation of Intel's new Advanced Performance Extensions.Some of that performance improvement will also come from memory controller improvements, since Nova Lake is meant to use DDR5-8000 memory out of the box, where Arrow Lake was relegated to 6400 MT/s. How this all shakes out, however, remains to be seen, since Intel has only promised more information at CES in January 2027.
Sources:
VideoCardz, Haze on X
While the leaker has been around for a while, there is no guarantee that this information is accurate, since the only cited source is "circulating chatter," however, the claim is that Intel's Nova Lake will outperform comparable last-generation Arrow Lake CPUs by 8-17% in raw single-thread performance, 15% in general-purpose workloads, and up to 20% in gaming. There is some nuance to these claims, with the 17% improvement figure exclusive to the higher-end CPUs that feature bLLC, while the 17% boost allegedly comes from the implementation of Intel's new Advanced Performance Extensions.Some of that performance improvement will also come from memory controller improvements, since Nova Lake is meant to use DDR5-8000 memory out of the box, where Arrow Lake was relegated to 6400 MT/s. How this all shakes out, however, remains to be seen, since Intel has only promised more information at CES in January 2027.

54 Comments on Intel Nova Lake-S Promises Up To 17% Single-Thread and 20% Gaming Performance Improvements
You can use the HX 370 to, the single core score of that chip is still ~2900 points. Meaning the gap is still only ~15% in ST, not 24% or 33%.
I'm curious though where do you see that the zen 6 chip is running at 12 watts?That's what was claimed, but Chips and Cheese's testing has revealed the IPC uplift in spec2026 to be ~10-15% IIRC.Their Zen 6 HF chips Fmax is 5.3GHz, and their dense cores is IIRC 4.1GHz
Their server chips are not running even close to 5.9GHz on one core much less all coresThis source also makes the same mistake you made, which is using GB's average scores instead of the scores of the chips actually tested in reasonable testing conditions.
But comparing zen 6 ES samples to the average GB website scores instead of the scores of zen 5 tested in actual laptops in reviews under reasonable testing conditions just to make the gap larger than what it should be, is just unreasonable.
Videocardz and other websites using those scores to make better sounding headlines is, in their eyes, "justifiable" for clickbait. What's your excuse?
I'm not even using the best scores, the average is ~2900 points. Not just the best results.
This is for the HX 370:
Also where in GB did it say the power draw was 12 watts? GB doesn't measure power draw...
But also as I mentioned in my comment above, single core performance doesn't scale with power to 85 watts like how you are implying it does. Take a look at this chart:
You just quoted my entire reply.