Intel Core Series 3 'Wildcat Lake' officially launched with up to 6 Cores

After months of rumors and speculations, Intel officially unveiled its Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" processors on Thursday. Intel's Core 300 series mobile CPUs will not carry the "Ultra" branding and will be targeted at the low-end to mid-range mobile and edge AI market. This lineup is set to counter products such as Apple's new MacBook Neo, while the new Panther Lake competes at the high end of the mobile market.

There are three segments in the Wildcat Lake lineup with the usual Core 3, Core 5, and Core 7 split. There is only one Core 3 chip, three Core 5 chips, and two high-end Core 7 chips, for a total of 6 SKUs in the lineup (as of right now). As previously leaked, Intel's Wildcat Lake CPUs feature a hybrid core configuration, with "Cougar Cove" P-cores and "Darkmont" LPE (low-power efficiency) cores, completely omitting traditional E-cores.

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The lineup starts with the most basic Core 3 304, which differs slightly from the others, as it has only one P-core paired with four LPE cores for a total of 5 cores. It has a P-core boost of 4.3 GHz and a TDP of 15W. It has only one Xe GPU core, another difference from the rest of the pile.

Moving up the chain, all other CPUs in the lineup have the same 6-core configuration: 2P+4LPE. The Core 5 SKUs can boost up to 4.6 GHz on the high end, while the Core 7 SKUs can boost to 4.8 GHz on the P-cores. All CPUs have 6MB of L3 cache, the same 15W TDP, and the same DDR5 memory support. These are identical to the leaked specs we covered recently.

Under the hood, the SoC package integrates two dies, with the main die featuring a 6-core CPU, Xe graphics, an NPU 5, a memory controller, and a cache pool. This die is built on the Intel 18A internal node. The second die handles I/O and provides 6 PCIe Gen 4 lanes, WiFi 7, Bluetooth 6, two Thunderbolt 4 connections, and eight USB 2.0 connections.

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Intel avoided any head-to-head performance comparisons against the MacBook Neo in the announcement, but they did show plenty of slides comparing the Core 300 series CPUs against a five-year-old PC. There was also no mention of gaming in the announcement, which might be due to the lack of graphical firepower. We will have to wait for third-party benchmarks to get a good idea of the real-world performance of these CPUs.

Intel claims that we will see more than 70 designs from partners such as Acer, ASUS, Colorful, Dell, Haier, Hasee, Honor, HP, Infinix, Lenovo, Xiaomi, MSI, Positivo, Samsung, Tecno, Wiko, and Machrevo. It remains to be seen what kind of pricing will be possible with these Wildcat Lake laptops, and whether it will be enough to sway users away from the $599 MacBook Neo.