A Chinese motherboard manufacturer has seemingly spilled the beans on the AI performance of Intel’s forthcoming Nova Lake chips, suggesting the NPU alone can work at a rate of 73 trillion operations per second (TOPS). If that’s true, it marks a big advance on the NPU in Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs, which was only rated at 13 TOPS.
The performance claim appears in a table on the page for Decenta’s M26-NVLS-ATX09 motherboard design, which can accommodate Q970 and B960 chipsets. This ATX board design has already been photographed out in the open, with tech leaker wxnod recently sharing a picture of it on X.
This led tech site Hardware Luxx to track down the board in question, and if you click on the Product Specifications tab on Decenta’s page about it, you can find a table full of details. That’s where you can find the AI performance claims.
According to the table, the CPU is rated at 39 TOPS, the dedicated NPU at 73 TOPS, and the GPU at 25 TOPS. The table also appears to confirm that the integrated GPU in Intel Nova Lake CPUs is based on the company’s 3rd-generation Xe graphics core, also known as Xe3.
This is the same graphics architecture used by Intel’s Panther Lake chips, but the GPUs in desktop Nova Lake CPUs are rumoured to only have 32 execution units. That’s a third of the number found in top-end Panther Lake chips, which explains the comparative lack of GPU TOPS – an Intel Core Ultra X9 388H has GPU AI performance rated at 122 TOPS (Int8).
If that 73 TOPS figure is correct for the NPU, though, then Intel has made great strides in this area since Arrow Lake. Even Panther Lake’s NPU is only rated at 50 TOPS.
As this motherboard is clearly designed for industrial applications, rather than PC gamers and hardware enthusiasts, the specs for the board itself are on the conservative side, don’t give much away. It can accommodate four DDR5 modules (up to 256GB) running at 6,400MT/s, and the Q970 version features a pair of PCIe 5.0 x16 slots that can either run in either single x16 or dual x8 configuration. There’s a PCIe 5 x4 M.2 connector as well.
In addition to massively improved NPU performance, top-end Nova Lake chips are also expected to come with a massive helping of cache to assist with gaming performance, denoted by a ‘BFC’ suffix at the end of their model names.
While we wait for Nova Lake to finally land, check out our guide to buying the best CPU for your needs if you want to upgrade now.
