Intel Core Ultra 9 4950K: the first Nova Lake-S leaks and announces something big

28 cores. No Hyper-Threading. And a score that, if confirmed, slaps everything that exists today on the consumer market.

The leaker LaurentsChoice a posted on August 19 a hastily taken photo of a screen, with CPU-Z open on it. Inside: a Core Ultra 9 4950K . A name that does not exist anywhere in the Intel catalog, and which changes two or three things in what we thought we knew about Nova Lake-S.

We sort between what is solid, what is plausible, and what deserves a raised eyebrow.

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The first thing that stands out: 4950K . Four digits. So far the Core Ultra range was running on three — Core Ultra 9 285K for Arrow Lake, for example.

The transition to four digits is not trivial. It's typically the kind of break that Intel makes when it wants to signal a change in architecture, and here we are talking about the successor to Arrow Lake on a presumably new socket. The "49" would serve as a generation marker, the "50" as positioning in the range.

The K, on the other hand, does not move: unlocked coefficient, overclocking possible. The good old recipe.

Note that the Hong Kong enthusiast Gotou_3rd has confirmed on its side that the naming scheme was correct. Two independent sources on the same point is already better than one.

The photo is voluntarily cropped tight — enough to read the model name, not much more. No readable frequencies, no TDP, no stepping. It's little.

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On the configuration of the cores, LaurentsChoice talks about 8P&20E . Except that it doesn't match well with the previous leaks. The most likely reading is rather 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores + 4 LP-cores — the LP-E being those low power cores that Intel hides in the SoC tile since Meteor Lake.

The total remains the same: 28 cores. But the distribution changes everything about the actual behavior of the chip, because an LP-E has neither the performance nor the role of a classic E-core.

Important point: Nova Lake abandons Hyper-Threading. 28 cores = 28 threads, period.

The leaker announces a single core score close to 1000 and a multi close to 20 000 . It does not specify the benchmark, but since the capture shows CPU-Z, we assume that it is the integrated bench.

And there it is necessary to measure what it represents.

In simple heart, no commercial processor has ever reached 1000 points on this test. The current record belongs to the Core i9-14900KS, and it remains below. A Nova Lake that would hit the symbolic bar would be a first.

In multi, it's even more telling. The best score under 32 threads today is the AMD EPYC 4585PX at 17 708 points — and this CPU is literally a Ryzen 9 9950X3D rebranded for the server. So if the 20,000 is confirmed, Intel moves ahead with about 13 % ahead , and this with a single computing tile.

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Because there are some, and not just a few.

• Zero corroboration. One single leaker, one single photo, no cross-validation on the scores themselves. No one has come up with the same result on their side.
• Approximate values. "Close to 1000", "close to 20 000" — these are not numbers, they are orders of magnitude. We don't even know if it's 970 or 1010.
• CPU-Z is not a real benchmark. It is a synthetic arithmetic test that does not represent any real workload. Neither gaming, nor rendering, nor compiling. A good CPU-Z score says absolutely nothing about your FPS in Crimson Desert.
• An engineering sample. The frequencies, the TDP, and the thermal behavior of an ES are still changing a lot before production.

In short, it's exciting. This is not proof.

Where the story becomes interesting is on the timing. Gotou_3rd claims that the qualification samples — the QS — do not still not been sent to the partners .

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Translation: external validation has not started. However, between the ES, the QS, and mass production, motherboard manufacturers need months to validate the silicon, adjust the firmwares, qualify their products, and ensure that everything holds up at launch.

Intel officially maintains that Nova Lake is coming at the end of 2026. There are three and a half months left. If Gotou_3rd is telling the truth, even a launch in the CES 2027 would be fair.

And it changes the reading of the announced duel with the Ryzen Zen 6. If AMD arrives on time and Intel slips by a quarter, the famous confrontation turns into a race where one of the two starts with a lap ahead.

It should be kept in mind that this 4950K and its 28 cores would correspond to the variant at a single calculation tile . The rumor of a version at 52 cores has been circulating for months, and that one would play in a different category.

If the simple tile version already surpasses the best AMD under 32 threads, we don't dare to imagine what the big one would yield. Except that the more tiles there are, the more inter-tile latency, thermal constraints, and scheduling headaches there are. Intel has already bitten the dust on this with the hybrid.

We'll see. For now, it only exists on slides and in tweets.

Nothing. Well, nothing right now.

If you are building a setup now, this leak should not make you wait. Between a launch that could slip to CES 2027, historically high launch prices from Intel, and the fact that Nova Lake will most likely require a new motherboard, we are talking about a complete budget rethink, not just a simple CPU swap.

And then there is the elephant in the room: the prices of RAM and storage . Having the best CPU in the world is not very useful if there is no more affordable DDR5 on the shelves to accompany it. The current shortage weighs more heavily on your next setup than any CPU-Z score.

The right reflex: note the info, and stick to what you can buy today at a reasonable price.

No. No communication from Intel to date. The name comes from a CPU-Z capture shared by a leaker, and has been corroborated by a second enthusiast on the naming scheme only — not on the performance.

Because Nova Lake abandons Hyper-Threading, like Arrow Lake before it. Each core processes only a single thread. This is also what makes the announced multi score impressive: it is achieved with fewer threads than the competition.

Not much that is directly transposable. CPU-Z is a synthetic arithmetic test. Gaming performance mainly depends on memory latency, cache, and frequencies under real load. Wait for independent tests.

Intel officially aims for the end of 2026. But if the qualification samples have not yet been sent to the partners, a shift to CES 2027, or even beyond, becomes the most credible scenario.

If your machine is running, you can wait and see. If you need a config now, don't wait: the date is not set, the price is unknown, and you will have to change the motherboard anyway.

A blurry photo, a leaker, two rounded figures. On paper, Intel is set to reclaim the crown of raw performance with a 28-core without Hyper-Threading that would surpass the best AMD in its category.

On the ground, the qualification samples haven't even left. And the DIY market is facing a memory crisis that makes the question of the next CPU a bit theoretical.

We keep an eye on it. But we are not reserving the budget yet.