Intel’s Razor Lake-AX is a 2028 chip, and the first thing I noticed is that nobody is pitching it for a laptop. Cho Min-sung, an Intel executive, laid out the roadmap on Friday at a Seoul conference on semiconductors for humanoid robots, according to the Korean outlet The Elec: today’s Panther Lake robotics kits offer 180 TOPS in theory, and Intel plans to reach the 700 TOPS level with Nova Lake early next year and Razor Lake-AX in 2028.

That sentence is ambiguous about whether the 700 belongs to Nova Lake, Razor Lake-AX, or both. The Elec’s headline and Wccftech both pin it on Razor Lake-AX, and I’ve done the same, but that is their reading, not a spec sheet. Neither report says what precision the 700 is measured in, and I can’t find a power figure in either. TOPS without precision is a number you can’t compare.

I’ve been here before. The Snapdragon X2 Elite’s 85 TOPS figure got relabeled at Summit, which I went through in the Day 2 write-up, and a peak number on a slide has never told me what a chip does inside a battery budget.

Intel’s yardstick is Nvidia’s Jetson AGX Orin at 275 TOPS, so 700 is about 2.5 times that. Orin is the older module. Wccftech quotes Nvidia’s current Jetson Thor parts at 400 and 865 TFLOPS of FP4, a different unit that doesn’t sit next to a TOPS figure at all, and that mismatch is the reason a TOPS-only slide flatters whoever draws it. I laid out where Thor and Qualcomm’s Dragonwing actually sit in the April comparison, and the IQ10 architecture piece has what Qualcomm put inside its robot brain.

Why 2028? Cho said Korean customers plan to mass-produce humanoids mostly in 2028, with mobile robots a year earlier.

Qualcomm has spent the year pitching itself as the platform for everything outside the phone, which I covered in its AI pivot past smartphones, and Intel is now putting a dated number on a conference slide before any humanoid maker has shipped volume. A figure for silicon two years out costs Intel nothing and makes everyone else’s roadmap look thin. I wouldn’t price in 700 TOPS until there’s silicon, a stated precision, and a wattage, since a robot’s battery doesn’t care about peak. The first checkpoint is Nova Lake, due next year; Razor Lake-AX comes after it.

Sources