At CES earlier this year, Intel launched its Core Ultra 3 Series of processors. During the launch, it hinted at a bevy of forthcoming Core 3 — note: no “Ultra” — products that would cater to a broader range of the PC market. This includes a cost-effective line of chips codenamed Wildcat Lake. These chips were teased to be Intel’s response to Apple’s efforts to attack the mainstream market with M1 MacBooks at Walmart and, more recently, the MacBook Neo.

While Intel did also talk about some potential Core Ultra 3 Series gaming parts, we’re going to focus on the more mainstream Wildcat Lake solution, which not only stands to help Intel and its partners compete with Apple, but also gives Intel a chance to compete in the budget consumer market against the Chromebook and its successor, the Googlebook, as well.

What Is a Wildcat Lake, Anyway?

Wildcat Lake features Intel’s typical 3, 5, and 7 hierarchy. (Note that Intel’s nomenclature can be a little confusing here, because the Core 3 family includes SKU names that start with “Core 3,” “Core 5,” and “Core 7.” And none of these should be confused with the higher-end Core 3 Ultra chips.) These new Core 3 Series chips — Core 3 304 through Core 7 360 — leverage the leading-edge Intel 18A process node and pair one or two Cougar Cove performance cores with four low-power Darkmont cores. Wildcat Lake borrows heavily from the Panther Lake family of chips, including the Xe3 GPU architecture and the NPU, but does so at a lower cost to enable more competitive pricing and performance.

There will be roughly six different Wildcat Lake models, all with either five or six total cores, with different GPU configurations. The fastest SKU, the Core 7 360, is up to 2x faster in some video tasks and up to 64% lower in power consumption for tasks like 4K YouTube streaming compared to Intel’s Core 7 150U. A lot of that performance is thanks to the 18A node and more efficient video and graphics IPs inherited from Panther Lake. These chips also leverage UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) to connect the compute and I/O dies, which helps to control cost while maximizing performance.

In its launch presentation deck, Intel even compared the new Core 7 360 to a five-year-old PC running a much more expensive mid-range i7-1185G7 and found significantly better performance across the board. Intel also interestingly compared NVIDIA’s Jetson Orin Nano edge AI chip with the Wildcat Lake Intel Core 7 350, showing edge AI performance competitiveness thanks to the Intel part’s GPU. All of the Core 3 Series processors have 15W base TDP and a maximum turbo power of 35W. The NPU performance ranges from 15 to 17 TOPS across the lineup — a decent NPU, albeit not quite Copilot+-capable. Maximum memory configurations go up to 48GB with LPDDR5x and 64GB with DDR5. With its significant improvements to enhance battery life, Wildcat Lake also enables the use of smaller batteries in laptops, which cuts down on cost and weight and improves portability.

What Is the Target Market for Wildcat Lake?

Wildcat Lake is really focused on the $400 to $700 laptop market but may end up finding its way into higher-priced systems thanks to the ongoing memory crunch. Intel says that Wildcat Lake has more than 70 design wins with OEMs, including confirmed devices from Acer, ASUS, HP, Honor, MSI, and more. Intel also confirmed that Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung already have plans to announce Wildcat Lake devices.

Intel has had a lot of competition from the likes of MediaTek and Qualcomm in this price segment, but the reality is that OEMs also need an affordable x86 option to compete with Apple and to field a competitive offering for Google’s new Android-based Googlebooks. One thing to consider, however, is that Wildcat Lake doesn’t have enterprise-grade manageability and security features like Intel vPro, so it won’t really be targeted towards enterprise use cases.

I believe that Intel’s efforts with Wildcat Lake will improve the overall competitiveness of the PC platform in this price segment and should yield much better low-cost PCs than we’ve seen in recent years. I do, however, believe that the price of Windows may be a limiting factor in matching Apple’s costs, given Apple’s bundling advantage of including its chips with MacOS at no additional cost. That said, Intel’s Project Firefly, an initiative the company has launched in China, squarely aims at helping to coalesce the supply chain around delivering cost-effective and standardized Wildcat Lake designs. We are already seeing some Chinese OEMs launch with Wildcat Lake, for example CHUWI’s $449 UniBook or Honor’s very premium-looking X14 at $599.