Intel Nova Lake-S photo leak shows what the company's new gaming CPUs will look like

Intel Nova Lake-S is the company's big upcoming gaming CPU launch, with the new chip design expected to offer significant performance improvements over its current Core Ultra 200 lineup and arrive either late this year or early next year. Already known to use a new LGA 1954 motherboard socket, the socket layout has been revealed by a freshly leaked photo showing the underside of the CPU.

Intel is being bullish about the power of its new chip design, which makes us wonder if it really could challenge the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D for top spot on our best gaming CPU guide. Not that we can glean performance from an image of the chip's pins, but it does reveal a few aspects of the new design.

The image comes from a post on X by a user named 'PoTAToOOOO,' with the image accompanied by the words "NovaLake-S LGA1954." PoTAToOOOO also notes that, "The front side looks almost identical to AlderLake."

This is a reference to Intel's current generation LGA 1700 desktop CPUs, such as the Intel Core Ultra 270K Plus, which have a similar rectangular shape and incorporate a cluster of surface-mounted components in the center of their 1954 contact pins. In contrast, AMD's latest AM5 socket CPUs have 1,718 pin contact pads with no other visible components, as shown below.

Both Intel and AMD's latest sockets use a gold contact pad system for the CPU, which requires the motherboards in which they're mounted to have an incredibly delicate array of thousands of tiny gold pins onto which the CPU nestles. In contrast, older CPU designs - including AMD's AM4 chips - had pins mounted on the CPU, with the motherboard having a much more robust array of mounting holes in it.

Both current CPU designs also use a motherboard-mounted retention system, whereby a metal plate surrounds the CPU, and an arm is used to press down and lock in place the chip. This is again a design we'd expect to be used for Intel Nova Lake-S.

You can find out more about what we're expecting from Intel's latest in our Intel Nova Lake-S guide, which details all the latest on the possible release date and specs of the new chips.