Intel's next-gen Nova Lake desktop processors will be the first client product to use Intel's enhanced 18A-P node, CEO Lip-Bu Tan confirmed in the company's Q3 2026 earnings call. The chief executive also said that the company intends to share more about Nova Lake at CES in January. The company's chief financial officer shared that Intel intends to take Panther Lake capacity offline to build more Granite Rapids data center CPUs.
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"Nova Lake, our first Intel 18A-P client product, is tracking ahead of schedule, with design wins expecting to be twice those of Panther Lake at launch," Tan said in his prepared remarks. "We look forward to sharing more at CES in January."
There has been a lot of speculation about what node Intel's Nova Lake CPUs will use, with the rumor mill ping-ponging between Intel 18A and TSMC's N2P. Current speculation says the chip will use 18A-P for the SoC tile while using TSMC's N2P for the compute tile. It seems unlikely that Intel would use its most advanced node for an SoC tile, though it's possible.
Regardless, Nova Lake chips will use 18A-P in some regard. Intel announced in June that 18A-P had entered risk production , and at Hot Chips in August, Intel revealed its next-gen Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids will be the company's first server products to use the enhanced node.
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