Get ready for the big heavy-duty laptop showdown between Intel and AMD. New leaks spell out Intel’s big plan for a CPU that levels up the company’s strong GPU performance. Even better, we may finally witness the outcome of Intel’s odd couple relationship with Nvidia on a whole new laptop-ready chip.
Intel’s whole operation is tuning itself to beat back AMD. The mostly reliable chip YouTuber/leaker “Moore’s Law is Dead” offered a glimpse into the chipmaker’s upcoming roadmap. The first step on its winding path is a series of desktop chips, the previously rumored upcoming Nova Lake desktop PC processors that should launch sometime later this year. The real spice for laptops may come in 2027, as the supposed “Razor Lake-AX” series.
While the YouTuber said Intel’s lower-end Razor Lake family will use similar P (performance) and E (efficiency) core architecture to “Nova Lake,” the big draw may be the promise of 32 Xe3P GPU cores on higher-end “AX” CPUs. That’s three times as many GPU cores as what we have on current Panther Lake lightweight laptops.
The real interest lies in the future with a supposed “Titan Lake” lineup exclusively built for mobile platforms. You may remember last year when Intel and Nvidia did their Wonder Twins routine and shouted, “form of… we don’t know yet.” According to Moore’s Law Is Dead, Nvidia and Intel will include the Nvidia-made integrated graphics processing unit. The chips may also feature Intel’s first “unified core” architecture that removes E cores altogether and replaces them with less- or more-performant “Copper Shark” cores.
Titan Lake would be slated for 2028, so there’s still a lot of time for events to change. You should take all leaks with a grain of salt, but there’s a reason why Intel has a good shot to compete. This week, AMD announced its Ryzen AI Max Pro 400 series chips. They’re essentially a minor upgrade from the previous Strix Halo designs from 2025 with the CPU boosted to the latest Zen 5 microarchitecture. All three chips in the new series keep the same old RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture as previous-gen chips.
That’s not to say chips like the flagship Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 won’t be a powerful APU (accelerated processing unit combining the CPU and GPU). Laptops like the Asus ProArt PX13 with the previous high-end Strix Halo chip still come out looking strong. However, these Halo designs are already being outclassed. Apple’s M5 Max chip inside a 14-inch MacBook Pro gets nearly 50% better scores in 3DMark’s “Steel Nomad” real-time graphics benchmarks than the ProArt PX13.
Intel’s latest Panther Lake chips support up to 12 of its latest Xe3 GPU cores. Strix Halo, with 40 of AMD’s compute units (the company’s GPU core clusters), outclasses Intel’s lightweight laptop chips. Despite that difference in weight class, Intel’s chips like the Core Ultra X9 388H hold their own in gaming at 1080p resolutions. They’re also efficient considering their capabilities, and we’ve seen solid battery life from these devices even when running graphically intensive software.
Intel will also need to compete with its partner Nvidia for high-end, graphically capable laptops. AMD may have other cards to play thanks to supposed RDNA 5 GPUs built for consoles like the PS6 and Xbox Project Helix coming in 2027. We may have many choices of capable laptops in a year’s time. Just don’t expect any modern high-end PC to land anywhere close to affordable.
Read the full article here
