A new Intel gaming CPU with a whopping 52 cores has just been spotted

A new Intel gaming CPU with a massive 52 cores has just been hinted at in a shipping manifest, just a week after a 28-core model was seen elsewhere. That core count far outstrips anything we’ve seen from Intel’s current Arrow Lake lineup, with its current Core Ultra 285K flagship capping out at just 24 cores.

A huge core count doesn’t necessarily lead to epic gaming performance, however, and it’s far too early to say whether or not these Intel Nova Lake CPUs will be contenders on our best gaming CPU guide. Nonetheless, the numbers here are striking. By our estimation, we’d expect this CPU to have a maximum of 16 Performance cores (P-Cores), which are the important ones for gaming, leaving 32 Efficiency cores (E-Cores) for multi-threaded work, with potentially four additional low-power (LP) E-cores left for background tasks. That's some serious multi-threaded processing power.