Chipzilla, though, insists the chip is aimed at “edge computing” rather than home PCs, which sounds suspiciously like marketing spin to manage expectations.

According to serial leaker @jaykihn0, the upcoming Bartlett Lake-S flagship will sport 12 P-cores, a 5.5GHz all-core boost, and a 3.4GHz base clock. That would make it the first Intel desktop chip to ship with more than eight P-cores since the company started flogging its hybrid designs.

This new approach drops efficiency cores, trading multitasking grunt for raw, old-school muscle. The result could be a gaming powerhouse, provided it actually lands on consumer motherboards.

The CPU will stick with the same LGA1700 socket used by Intel’s 12th, 13th, and 14th-gen chips, but compatibility isn’t guaranteed.

Official specs mention support for DDR5-5600 and DDR4-3200 memory, plus 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes and 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes directly off the CPU. There’s even ECC memory support and an integrated Xe GPU with 32 execution units, which might come in handy for workstations.

The chip’s TDP is 125W, which isn’t too bad considering the boost frequency, and it reportedly won’t require exotic cooling. However, the 12-core Bartlett Lake-S is expected to ship locked, meaning overclocking via the multiplier is off the table. You could still tinker with the base clock, but you’d be risking stability for bragging rights.

If the rumours hold, Bartlett Lake-S could outperform the hybrid Arrow Lake-S in games and lightly threaded workloads. But the absence of efficiency cores makes it look more like a niche part for specialists than the new darling of gamers.

Either way, this leak gives the impression that Chipzilla is trying to make headlines by shoving the clock speed dial to eleven, rather than fixing its bigger problem, convincing the world that Intel still knows what it’s doing.