Intel Nova Lake 18A-P plans are now official at the product-family level. Chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said on Intel’s third-quarter 2026 earnings call that Nova Lake will be the company’s first client product built with its performance-enhanced 18A-P manufacturing process. He also said Intel will disclose more at CES in January.
Tan said Nova Lake was ahead of schedule and that its launch design wins were expected to be twice those of Panther Lake. That is Intel’s forecast, not a shipped-product result.
The confirmation settles one narrow but useful point: Nova Lake will use 18A-P in some capacity. It does not say which individual parts, or tiles within a chip, will be made on that process. Reports and social-media discussion have offered claims about possible tile assignments, including potential outside manufacturing, but Intel’s disclosed remarks do not settle those specifications.
What did Intel confirm about Nova Lake 18A-P?
Intel confirmed that Nova Lake is an 18A-P client product. A process node is the manufacturing technology used to make a chip. Intel describes 18A-P as an enhanced version of 18A, the process it previously identified as being used first in Panther Lake.
Intel has said 18A-P can provide 9% higher speed at the same power, or 18% lower power at the same speed, compared with 18A. Those are company figures, not independent benchmark results. Intel has also described 18A-P as a drop-in replacement for 18A, meaning designs made for 18A could move to the newer process without additional engineering work.
Intel said in June that 18A-P had entered risk production. The company has also said its future Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids server processors will be its first server products on the enhanced node, according to Tom’s Hardware.
Intel shifts capacity described as Panther Lake-related
Chief financial officer David Zinsner said Intel is taking offline 18A wafers that were generally intended for Panther Lake products while bringing Intel 3 capacity online in Oregon. He said the resulting freed capacity gave Intel an opportunity to produce more data-center wafers.
Tom’s Hardware identified the additional data-center output as Granite Rapids, though the quoted remarks from Zinsner refer only to “data center wafers” and do not name a processor line. The comments describe a targeted reallocation and do not specify Intel’s broader 18A production plans.
The company is making that shift while projecting a weaker PC market. Zinsner said Intel expects 2026 PC unit TAM to fall about 12%, with second-half units down more than 20%, and forecasts a roughly 10% decline in 2027. Intel also expects its client business to decline by more than 20% in the following quarter, he said.
Data-center processors are chips intended for the servers that run cloud services and other centralized computing workloads. Data centers house large numbers of those servers, along with networking, power and cooling equipment. Intel has said it sees an opportunity to make more wafers for that market; it has not disclosed the full Nova Lake manufacturing breakdown yet.
This story draws on original reporting from Tom's Hardware.
