There’s been a lot of speculation and rumours around Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake CPUs, and more specifically, word surrounding the rumoured 52-core CPU. The latest rumour suggests that said CPU would be capable of pulling as much as 474W of power, and that’s if the CPU is of the dual-compute tile SKU.
The rumours stem from two leaksters, LC Tech Leaks and Jaykihn, and state that the 474W power consumption is the CPU before overclocking is applied. In light of the increased power requirement, Jaykihn claims that some Z990 boards — the chipset for Nova Lake — will ship out with three 8-pin CPU power ports, compared to the standard two ports that you’ll find on motherboards, both current and previous generations.
Note that Jaykihn says that only some motherboards will ship out with that extra 8-pin CPU connector. Supposedly, it’s still not a requirement for the 52-core Nova Lake CPU, with the standard two on Z990 boards still capable of sustaining 175W Performance. For that matter, Z970 boards aren’t expected to use three connectors.
Elaborating further, Jaykihn also says that Nova Lake boards will be segmented by wattage and, more specifically, CPUs installed in boards rated below their PL1 will use a lower performance profile by default. For example, some boards will have 65W Value/Performance, 125W Baseline/Performance and 175W Baseline/Performance.
At the time of writing, Intel has not confirmed any of these figures, nor has it confirmed the final board requirements of the Z990 chipset. That said, the profiles mentioned earlier are still subject to change, meaning that the final product could turn out vastly or slightly different.
Intel’s Nova Lake 900 series platform is expected to include a B960, Z970, Z990, Q970, and W980 chipsets, support an all new LGA1954 socket, and have the Z990 chipset have more I/Os, as well as full overclocking support.
(Source: Jaykihn via X [1] [2], LC Tech Leaks via X, Videocardz)