Intel’s forthcoming Nova Lake CPUs are “quite similar” to the company’s existing Arrow Lake chips when it comes to gaming performance, according to often-reliable tech leaker kopite7kimi. The exception will be Intel’s ‘BFC’ processors, which are said to come with a big last level cache (bLLC), similar to the 3D V-Cache in AMD’s X3D CPUs.
In a post on X, kopite7kimi described BFC as a way to “try to save the gaming performance of NVL,” while also appearing to confirm that the ‘F’ in ‘BFC’ does indeed stand for a very rude word, much like BFG (and we don’t mean Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant). Gaming performance was very far from Arrow Lake’s strong point when it first came out. In fact, in our Core Ultra 9 285K review, it sat at the bottom of our table in Cyberpunk 2077 at FHD and QHD resolutions.
After getting a royal pasting for gaming pace in the press, Intel made a number of tweaks under the hood, including a massive increase in the die-to-die interconnect speed, resulting in the superior (and much cheaper) Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. If Nova Lake does performs similarly to these Arrow Lake Refresh chips, then it shouldn’t be a disaster for Intel, as we found they offered decent performance in our game tests, while also bringing loads of multi-threaded power to the table.
Meanwhile, the extra cache in BFC chips should help Intel take on AMD’s X3D CPUs in gaming. As we found in our 270K plus vs 9800X3D feature, the latter definitely still has the upper hand when it comes to frame rates. The great unknown here, of course, is AMD’s forthcoming Zen 6 CPUs. Arrow Lake Refresh marked a big catch-up moment for Intel, but only with AMD’s Zen 5 CPUs that had already been out for a while, and not the X3D models.
Intel is rumoured to be introducing BFC Nova Lake CPUs first when it launches the new lineup, with a recent leak of Nova Lake model names fleshing out what we might be able to expect. If the latter is true, the flagship Core Ultra 9 4970K BFC will offer eight P-Cores, 16 E-Cores, and four LPE-Cores, while offering a big extra helping of cache.
Meanwhile, the non-BFC lineup is expected to top out at the Core Ultra 9 4950K, which has the same core configuration, but doesn’t have the extra cache. There are currently no Core 5-level chips without BFC expected, but a Core Ultra 5 4650K is also on the list without the big cache, coming with six P-Cores and 12 E-Cores.
The only way we’ll know for sure, of course, is to test the chips for ourselves when they finally launch, and we’re very much looking forward to it. In the meantime, check out our guide to buying the best CPU for your needs, if you’re looking for a new chip now.
