Intel Nova Lake Aims For Gaming Leadership With An Answer To AMD's 3D V-Cache

AMD has held the upper hand in PC gaming for years now, thanks to its X3D processors and their massive 3D V-Cache. By stacking extra cache on top of the CPU, AMD drastically cuts memory latency—arguably the biggest performance bottleneck in modern games, at least on the CPU side—and keeps much more data closer to the CPU cores, which translates directly to higher frame rates.


A newly leaked slide from Game.Keeps.Loading (@G_melo_ding on X) hints that Intel may finally have a response. The slide touts "Leadership Gaming Performance" and claims Nova Lake offers over 1.1x higher single-threaded and 1.6x multi-threaded performance. That's promising on its own, but the real kicker might be a long-rumored feature called bLLC.


bLLC stands for Big (or Base [tile]) Last Level Cache, and it's reportedly coming to Nova Lake in at least two SKUs, according to leaker @Haze2K1 as we previously reported. The extra on-package SRAM, which purportedly lives in the processor's "base tile" upon which the the processor's other tiles rest, would act much like AMD's 3D V-Cache, cutting latency and boosting game performance across the board.

Intel's past experiments with large caches—like the L4 cache in 2015's Broadwell chips—proved how effective the strategy can be long before AMD was stacking SRAM, but the company never followed through with a proper gaming-focused implementation, despite multiple commentators directly imploring the chipmaker to do so, including me.


Nova Lake might finally change that. If these leaks are accurate, Nova Lake could pair even higher single-threaded performance than Arrow Lake with a huge reduction in memory latency. That combo could be enough to knock AMD off the top of the gaming performance charts. Unfortunately, it'll probably be a year before we hear anything officially from Intel, so let's hope for juicier leaks sooner than later.