Leaked Dell roadmap introduces split Intel/Qualcomm lineup through to Nova Lake in 2027

HardwareGaming LaptopsLeaked Dell roadmap introduces split Intel/Qualcomm lineup through to Nova Lake in 2027When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Dell XPS 14

A leaked roadmap of Dell’s laptop plans shows the system builder is planning on supporting five new CPU architectures in new Dell machines over just three years, with the current Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake models being given a serious overhaul.

At the moment, Dell uses a combination of Raptor Lake (RPL-H, RPL-P) and Meteor Lake (MTL-H) chips for all its XPS laptops, but this year will introduce an updated XPS 13 model, sporting one of two Arm-based Snapdragon X CPUs. Later in 2024, that same model will be updatedagainbut this time, sporting an IntelLunar Lakechip.

Still with me? Good. Other snippets tucked away in that one chart are the expectation that Nvidia’s next generation of mobile GPUs (i.e.Blackwell RTX 50-series) will appear in 2025 and that Intel’s eventual successor to Panther Lake, called Nova Lake, is expected to make an appearance in 2027.

But that’s still an awful lot of changes in a relatively short period and I should imagine it’s going to cause no end of confusion to the casual buyer, trying to understand the differences between the various models.

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The one caveat to all this, however, is that the leaked document is from August last year, almost 12 months old now, and so the roadmap could well have changed in the intervening time. The doc mentions an Nvidia laptop GPU refresh that clearly isn’t going to happen, so not all can be taken as gospel. Still, it’s an interesting insight into just how tricky it’s going to get for laptop makers with just a third extra player in the Windows device market, with Qualcomm joining AMD and Intel. Just imagine what it’ll be like when the other Arm-based chips arrive.

TheMeteor Lakelaptops we’ve reviewed so far have been pretty good, fine at 1080p gaming, though not especially great in terms of power consumption. Hopefully, each new Intel architecture will keep on improving game performance and make the chips a tad kinder on the battery. Just how good the first-gen Snapdragon X Elite CPUs Will be in the final reckoning, though, is still up in the air. Qualcomm is confident, and maybe Dell is, too, but it won’t be long before we find out whether its silicon can really compete.

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