Intel is cooking up a new gaming CPU that beats the Core i9 14900K, says leak

A new Intel document leak has surfaced, which appears to confirm that a new Intel gaming CPU is in the works with 12 P-Cores and no E-Cores. As it's the P-Cores (where the P stands for "performance") that are the most important ones for gaming when it comes to Intel CPUs, that would potentially make this new Intel CPU an even stronger gaming chip than the mighty Core i9 14900K.

The latter CPU only has eight P-Cores, with 16 lower-power E-Cores (where E stands for "efficiency") pushing up the total to 24. However, it's the eight P-Cores that make the Core i9 14900K the company's best gaming CPU, especially with their sky-high turbo clock speed of up to 6GHz. As such, while this new Intel CPU appears to only have 12 cores, it looks like it could be a much better option for gaming than Intel's chips with many cores, assuming the clock speed is high enough.

The new CPU is listed as part of the new range of chips codenamed Bartlett Lake S. We've heard Intel Bartlett Lake rumors before, along with speculation that they're likely to use the same LGA1700 motherboard socket as Intel 12-14th gen CPUs, potentially making for an easy upgrade path if you already own one of the best gaming motherboards using this platform. However, this is the first time we've seen them listed in what looks like an official Intel document, which states that the new CPUs will use the same Core Series 2 branding as current Intel Arrow Lake CPUs.

The new CPU apparently appeared in a (now deleted) Intel presentation slide, as detailed in a post on X (formerly Twitter) by InstLatX64, who shared a screengrab of it before it was taken down, with tech site Wccftech later grabbing a full version of the slide. The slide appears to confirm several forthcoming Intel products, including Nova Lake S for the desktop. However, it's the Bartlett Lake-S CPUs that are of interest here.

The presentation also clearly includes a "Bartlett Lake S 12P", where the S usually stands for socketed desktop CPUs in Intel's branding, and the 12P looks like it refers to the CPU having 12 P-Cores.

There are a couple of weird anomalies with this screenshot, though. One is that the revision date at the bottom reads 6 September 2024, whereas the now-missing presentation is dated as being released in May 2025.

A footnote on the slide also notes that "the information above is not an official POR document and may be different from other Intel divisions with similar products." We can't take this slide as an official reveal by Intel, accidental or not, but the fact that it's been screenshotted by multiple sources suggests it was genuinely up on the Intel website.

We'll have to wait and see whether Intel does indeed have a super gaming CPU with 12 P-Cores in development, and whether it will have decent clock speeds or not, but Intel certainly do with some help on the gaming front. Not only did Intel's 14th-gen and 13th-gen CPUs suffer from loads of stability problems over the last few months, requiring a raft of Intel microcode updates, but AMD's new eight-core X3D CPU also outperforms the latest Intel Arrow Lake CPUs in games, as we found in my AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review.

In the meantime, check out my CPU install guide if you're looking to upgrade your processor in the near future, as well as our guide on how to apply thermal paste.

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