Intel Razor Lake-AX gets official 2028 roadmap confirmation after months of leaks

Intel has finally confirmed the existence of its upcoming Razor Lake-AX processor, which has been the subject of numerous leaks over the past few months. According to South Korean publication The Elec, Intel executive Cho Min-sung outlined the company’s future robotics roadmap at the Semiconductors Powering Humanoids conference on 16 October, revealing that Razor Lake-AX is planned for 2028 with approximately 700 TOPS of AI processing performance.

For context, Intel’s current Panther Lake-based robotics platform delivers up to 180 TOPS of combined AI performance. The company plans to introduce Nova Lake for robotics applications in early 2027, followed by Razor Lake-AX in 2028. The latter represents a nearly fourfold increase in theoretical AI compute over Panther Lake, although Intel has not specified the numerical precision or individual CPU, GPU and NPU contributions behind the figure.

Razor Lake-AX was initially rumoured as Nova Lake-AX, a high-performance APU designed to compete with AMD’s Strix Halo lineup. Subsequent leaks suggested the chip would feature either 16 or 32 Xe3P GPU cores, potentially making it one of Intel’s most powerful integrated graphics solutions. Another report indicated that Razor Lake-AX could feature on-package memory, similar to Lunar Lake, potentially providing the substantial memory bandwidth needed by such a large iGPU.

There have also been some interesting developments regarding its CPU architecture. Leaker Jaykihn previously claimed that Razor Lake-AX would reuse Nova Lake’s Coyote Cove P-cores and Arctic Wolf E-cores, rather than the newer Griffin Cove and Golden Eagle cores expected elsewhere in the Razor Lake family. Furthermore, the AX variant reportedly misses out on the big Last Level Cache (bLLC) rumoured for other Razor Lake processors.

Interestingly, Intel’s latest disclosure positions Razor Lake-AX as more than just a potential competitor to AMD’s Ryzen AI Max processors. The company is also targeting humanoid robotics, where substantial on-device computing power is required for perception, decision-making and real-time control. According to The Elec, Intel expects customers to begin mass-producing autonomous mobile robots in 2027, with humanoid robots following in 2028.

Intel already offers the Panther Lake-based Robinson Bay robotics development platform, along with software tools such as OpenVINO, Physical AI Studio and Robotics AI Suite. Razor Lake-AX could eventually provide substantially more compute for these workloads without relying on a separate GPU.

That said, Intel has yet to confirm whether Razor Lake-AX will also appear in conventional laptops and mini PCs, although it makes little sense to confirm a widely rumoured platform for robotic use only. Its 700 TOPS performance target has also not been accompanied by details about power consumption, memory capacity or graphics performance. Nevertheless, the latest announcement establishes a concrete timeframe for the processor and suggests that Intel is preparing a serious high-performance APU offering for 2028.