It's taken its sweet time, but Intel's response to AMD's X3D chips is starting to look tasty

With little sign of new and exciting GPUs, and with rising memory prices affecting just about everything in a less than positive manner, it's new CPUs that I'll be keeping my optimistic eyes peeled for. That's doubly so now that we're getting wind of the specs for Intel's upcoming Nova Lake generation.

According to tech leaker Laurent's Choice on X, we can expect a range of next-gen Intel CPUs to use a 4000-series naming scheme—though still following Core Ultra nomenclature—and three of these will be 'BFC' chips featuring bLLC ('big last-level cache'). 'BFC' presumably means 'big friendly cache' or... something to that, err, effect. I'll let you fill in the blanks.

This will be Intel's answer to the 3D V-Cache we see in AMD X3D chips such as the current best CPU on the market, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Games love chomping through cache, so the more merrier. …