Intel reportedly prepping supercharged Nova Lake-AX mobile chips for gaming — Team Blue’s high-performance APU to rival AMD’s Strix Halo

A popular Intel leaker has confirmed to Tom’s Hardware that Intel is preparing a Nova Lake-based mobile chip designed to face off with AMD’s Strix Halo APU. Jaykihn posted on X a simple “Preliminary Nova Lake-AX”, with another hardware leak source, HXL, commenting “intel Halo” — indicating that this fabled silicon could be Team Blue’s answer to the mobile APU with a powerful integrated GPU that AMD claims can reportedly beat a discrete RTX 4070 laptop GPU in modern games.

This is the first time that Intel is using the AX suffix in its lineup; its current top-tier mobile gaming processor with a strong integrated GPU is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX, which features four GPU cores. Intel’s Arrow Lake-HX chips only have six to eight P-cores and eight to 16 E-cores. You also get the same number of threads since the company ditched hyperthreading to improve power efficiency. Its TDP ranges from 55 watts to 160 watts, but the maximum you can achieve will still depend on the laptop manufacturer.

On the other hand, the most powerful Strix Halo chip — the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 — boasts 40 GPU compute units, enabling it to compete directly with discrete mobile graphics cards. Strix Halo APUs range from six to 16 cores, delivering 12 to 32 threads, and can be configured with up to 128 GB of soldered RAM. They have a minimum TDP of 45 watts but can go as high as 120 watts for the most powerful mobile workstations. The biggest disadvantage of the Strix Halo family is that it uses soldered RAM, whereas Arrow Lake-HS generally lets you expand your system RAM later.

If the Nova Lake-AX does make it to the market, you can expect its specifications and performance to at least match these chips. Unfortunately, we don’t have additional information about the processor. At the moment, all we know is that the Nova Lake architecture is slated for a 2026 launch. If Intel follows its usual release schedule, we expect its laptop variants, including the mysterious Nova Lake-AX, to arrive in early 2027. These upcoming chips are crucial for Intel, especially with the disappointing market response to its Arrow Lake CPUs. Hopefully, it will deliver a laptop processor that rivals entry-level (and maybe even mid-range) laptop graphics cards by then.

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