It’s not an understatement to say that AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology has been a critical success and massive hit amongst gamers, the news of them committing seppuku on specific motherboard brands notwithstanding. Intel has clearly been feeling the sting of this, which is probably why there are now rumours of the brand making Nova Lake CPUs with at least 144MB of bLLC cache.
bLLC, short for big last-level cache, or big cache for short, is reportedly going to be Intel’s answer to AMD’s 3D V-Cache, and that it plans on releasing a total of four SKUs with the cache. As per serial leakster, Kopite7kimi’s replies on X, the CPUs are split into two groups: two dual-compute tile designs and two single-compute tile designs.
Sitting pretty at the top of the pyramid are 2x 8+16 and 2x 8+12 layouts, each with two 144MB bLLC tiles, for a total of 288MB of cache. Right below the group is the single-compute tile, which is basically the same layout, just with one bLLC tile less.
This suggests that the dual-tile configurations could make their appearance with Intel’s 52-core and 48-core CPUs. It makes sense, particularly from a premium, top-tier SKU range, in a roundabout sort of way.
Intel’s launch of its Arrow Lake CPU lineup last year was pretty lacklustre, to say the least. While the lineup boasts better performance-per-watt ratios, many gamers and reviewers, present company included, concluded that the chipmaker could have boosted its over gaming performance. That said, at least it wasn’t killing itself from a microcode issue.
AMD’s upping the ante and applying the pressure too; rumours of a Ryzen 9 9950XD2 CPU with dual X3D CCDs are supposedly in the works, with a potential 2026 announcement and launch.
(Source: Kopite7kimi via X [1] [2], Videocardz)
