A decade ago, Call of Duty sidelined its iconic progression system to…

Besides the moment-to-moment shooting, what's the one thing that's made Call of Duty the success that it is today? If you ask me, it's the progression. You level up your account, unlocking new guns as you go, which pulls you into the camo grind, all for you to prestige and do it all over again. It's a dopamine rush that worms its way deep into your brain. I still remember the incredibly obnoxious (but admittedly cool) level-up sounds from the original Modern Warfare trilogy era.

Point is, you don't mess with the bones of Call of Duty's finely-tuned progression system. A slice of advice that I wished 2014's Advanced Warfare would have heeded. But instead it threw the progression system out of balance. A sin so heinous, I'd clearly expunged it from my mind at some point in the decade since for my own sanity, only to be reminded of it watching YouTuber Replay Mode's retrospective videos.

Advanced Warfare introduced the short-lived weapon variants feature. Basically, you'd unlock weapons like you normally would by leveling up, but each gun also had a handful of tiered variants that significantly tweaked their performance. They were similar to today's cosmetic-only weapon blueprints but with a very real impact on their stats and performance.

For example, the MP11 Goliath variant gave this SMG bonus damage at the cost of handling, which resulted in a bafflingly quick time-to-kill in close range. Likewise, the Bal-27 Obsidian Steed gained bonus damage and mobility but reduced accuracy, handling, and rate of fire compared to its base counterpart. And no variant was more iconic (or infamous) than the ASM1 Speakeasy, which turned this SMG into a Tommy Gun that absolutely ripped.

It was an interesting idea, in all honesty. If you didn't like a base weapon, perhaps you would like one of its variants instead. And it also led to some pretty cool designs, like the aforementioned Speakeasy. The only issue was that weapon variants were inextricably linked to gacha mechanics.

One of Advanced Warfare's biggest contributions to Call of Duty history was Supply Drops. A brand-new way to monetise the series known for being the best-selling shooter every year, because releasing paid map packs, and the ill-fated Elite subscription just weren't cutting it anymore.

Supply Drops would hand out purely cosmetic clothing items (this is still my favourite customisation system the series has seen), and most importantly, weapon variants.

Everyone wanted the ASM1 Speakeasy variant, but it wasn't down to you, it was all on RNG's shoulders. Maybe you'd get lucky and snag the Speakeasy on your first Supply Drop and be set for life, or maybe you'd get it 100 Supply Drops down the line. Or if you were me, you'd never get it while your friends were having a blast shoving it in your face.

You'd earn Supply Drops every 45 minutes of in-game time, but surprise, surprise, you could purchase Advanced Supply Drops from the store which had better odds. All the best weapon variants were the rarest, of course. Try your luck in the free Supply Drops, or pay a few bucks to still try your luck at getting some of the strongest guns. Hell, you could even get duplicates, which were worthless.

That's gacha mechanics right there, complete with power creep as legendary elite weapon variants were basically always better (and cooler-looking) than lower quality ones. You could buy one crate for just $1.99, or upwards of $39.99 for 28 boxes, which is tame by today's standards but was still quite outlandish for 2014.

Supply Drops were tweaked in subsequent titles—Black Ops 3's handed out exclusive weapons, Infinite Warfare's returned to variants but this time they had unique perks instead of stat changes, and WWII even gave you a hub area to open loot boxes in front of other players. Revolutionary, really. The system was eventually removed in favour of a battle pass in Modern Warfare 2019, reflecting a shift in monetisation strategies across the gaming landscape.

Looking back on this system over a decade later, it's still infuriating that Activision made such a drastic, obviously-in-game-gambling decision with Advanced Warfare—dragging down one of the best Call of Duty games in the name of monetisation. If only Advanced Warfare was a blip or cautionary tale. But let's be honest, little's changed when it comes to excessive monetisation in Call of Duty games.

Rumours around Intel's next-gen Nova Lake CPUs have multiplied rapidly in recent days. Highlights include an IPC performance advantage over AMD's upcoming Zen 6 chips, a core count upgrade for some models, and a massive APU variant to take on AMD's Strix Halo or its successor.

First up, those IPC claims. IPC refers to instructions per clock, and it's essentially a measure of how much work a CPU core does in each clock cycle. It's not a measure of overall performance, because IPC combines with clock speed to determine actual performance.

In other words, a processor's performance hinges on how much work a core does per clock cycle multiplied by the number of clock cycles per second. Anyway, established tech leaker HXL on X recently posted the following superficially cryptic message: "IPC: CYC>Zen6. Clock: Zen6>CYC".

For reference, "CYC" here refers to Coyote Cove, which is the generation of Performance core used by Nova Lake CPUs. With that in mind, the leaker is claiming that Nova Lake will beat AMD's Zen 6 when it comes to IPC, but Zen 6 will have a clockspeed advantage.

To be frank, with just those two data points, anything is possible. For instance, should AMD's clockspeed advantage be sufficient, it could still beat Intel regarding single-core performance. Exactly how high AMD will clock its next-gen Zen 6 cores isn't known, but some rumours point to figures in excess of 6 GHz thanks to the use of TSMC's most advanced N2P silicon.

Next up, Intel has apparently upgraded its mid-range Nova-Lake model from 42 cores to 44 cores. These variants have previously been said to be based on two Nova Lake compute tiles, each with 7 Performance, 12 Efficient and 4 Low Power Efficient cores. But the full-sized Nova Lake compute tile contains eight P cores. And now all eight are said to be enabled for this SKU according to another established X leaker, @jaykihn0.

Of course, the top Nova Lake chips have long been said to get 16 P cores, 32 E cores and four LPE cores, making for a grand total of 52 cores and a right old monster of a CPU. This new rumour does nothing to change that. What it does do is imply that whatever process Intel is using for Nova Lake, yields are probably decent.

After all, presumably the reason why Intel had previously disabled a P core in each tile on the previous 42-core model was to enable some chips with a dead P core to be used. If Intel has decided it doesn't need to do that, maybe yields are particularly good.

Another rumour involves a chip that is variously referred to as either Nova Lake AX or Razer Lake AX. Either way, what we're dealing with here is a monster APU that's said to use an absolutely huge socket known as LGA4326.

Indications of just such a socket have been found in shipping manifests on NBD Data attached to the NVL-AX code, which seems to be a pretty clear reference to Nova Lake AX. Some sources now refer to this chip as Razer Lake AX, and the implication here is that an earlier Nova Lake-based APU has been cancelled in favour of another APU using the newer Razer Lake architecture.

The most important aspect is that an LGA4326 implies an absolutely massive CPU socket with 4,326 contacts. @jaykihn0 on X says it's actually a BGA rather than LGA socket, but the point is that 4,326 contacts or pin outs is a massive step up from the 1,851 in Intel's current LGA1851 socket for desktop Arrow Lake CPUs.

Previously, Nova Lake AX was rumoured to run 28 CPU cores and 48 GPU cores, the latter based on Intel's upcoming Xe3P architecture. It's not known if the shift from Nova Lake AX to Razer Lake AX changes that, but given that this big APU is expected to be a chiplet design, it's quite possible that Intel could switch out the CPU tile but stick with its plans for the GPU tile.

On paper, a GPU tile with 48 Xe3P cores would be hugely powerful. Intel's current Arc B580 GPU has just 20 Xe2 cores. So, this rumoured APU has well over double the cores, and presumably each Xe3P core is more powerful than an Xe2 core. That said, @jaykihn0 nevertheless claims that there will be a version for laptops, which is intriguing, even if most observers think Razer Lake AX will be targeted at running local AI workloads rather than gaming. We'll just have to wait and see.

Taken overall, what we probably can conclude is that Intel's next-gen CPUs look like a much more exciting family of chips than anything Intel has produced in recent years. We're talking very powerful individual CPU cores combined with high core counts and maybe even the option of an APU variant with a properly powerful GPU.

As ever, rumours are just rumours until products are launched. But we've haven't seen rumours this exciting about upcoming Intel chips for ages.