According to Tom’s Hardware, Intel's Nova Lake chips are currently undergoing validation. Nova Lake is the successor to Intel's Arrow Lake series of processors and is expected to debut in 2026-27. While the manifests don't reveal any key details, it is essential to understand that final specifications are still subject to change.

It looks like a low-end “i3 variant.”  It is probably a placeholder since Chipzilla has ditched the "i" prefix in its CPU name.

The shipping manifest includes a single entry dating back to 9 December marked as "FOC," which should stand for "Free Of Charge." The listing explicitly tags the item as a "Microprocessor" and a "Test Chip" labelled "NVL," shorthand for Nova Lake. Last month, Wildcat Lake reball jigs surfaced similarly at NBD.

Intel has yet to reveal what production node will be used by Nova Lake, which is due between 2026 and 2027. However, given that it says its next mobile CPU, Panther Lake, will be produced internally on 18A silicon and that Panther Lake comes before Nova Lake, 18A at least seems likely.

Nova Lake might even end up on Chipzilla’s future 14A node, as it has yet to prove that it has reached 18A and is working well. It is also unlikely that Intel would build test chips on 14A.

Nova Lake will be a chiplet design again but hopefully avoid the cock up with Arrow Lake's architecture where the memory controller was located on a separate die from the CPU cores, introducing performance-sapping latency.

Intel's more successful Lunar Lake laptop chip used just two chiplets and put the CPU cores on the same die as the memory controller. Panther Lake is rumoured to have CPU cores and memory controllers on the same die, while Nova Lake will not.