Intel 'Wildcat Lake' benchmarks spotted, the Core 5 320 is 21% faster than the MacBook Neo's A18 Pro

The first independent benchmarks for Intel Core 300 "Wildcat Lake" CPUs are just starting to appear. Wildcat Lake was the topic of speculation for a long time, until Intel made the series official earlier this month. The Core 300 series of CPUs is meant to slot under the Core Ultra 300 "Panther Lake" chips in Intel's lineup and are targeted towards mid-range mobile and edge applications.

Recently, the Core 5 320, a mid-range Wildcat Lake chip, was spotted on benchmarking site PassMark. The results are quite impressive, and they look even better when compared to other CPUs. Keep in mind that the Core 5 320 is a 6-core, 6-thread CPU with 2 "Cougar Cove" P-cores and 4 "Darkmont" LPE cores, but no traditional E-cores.

On PassMark, the new Wildcat Lake chip scored a multi-threaded rating of 15222 and a single-threaded score of 4047. To put it into context, the single-threaded score is not anything to write home about, since the CPU can only boost to 4.6 GHz on the P-cores. However, the multi-core result is impressive, since it leads the Apple A18 Pro by 21%. That is the chip used in the new Apple MacBook Neo! The single-threaded result for the A18 Pro is 4066, which is essentially identical to the Wildcat Lake Core 5 320.

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We can also compare the result to other relevant CPUs on PassMark to get a better idea of where the Core 5 320 stands. It has better single-core performance than both the Core Ultra 5 236V "Lunar Lake" and the Ryzen AI 5 340 "Strix Point" CPUs. However, the Wildcat Lake CPU falls short in multi-threaded performance because it simply does not have enough cores to keep up. It should be noted, however, that despite having only 2 Xe3 graphics cores, the performance-per-core is much higher than older "Lunar Lake" models.

Regardless, it should be understood that the Core 5 320 is merely an entry-level chip of the Wildcat Lake family. Therefore, its performance (especially compared to the $699 MacBook Neo) is particularly impressive. If this performance scales properly, laptops with higher-end variants such as the Core 7 360 will theoretically be able to compete at the higher end of the market while remaining relatively affordable.

Of course, we have to wait for more independent third-party reviews of laptops with Wildcat Lake CPUs before making a judgment. It seems like several models are coming soon from the likes of ASUS, Colorful, Dell, Haier, Hasee, Honor, HP, Infinix, Lenovo, Xiaomi, MSI, Positivo, Samsung, Tecno, Wiko, and Machrevo. We have also recently seen an Intel reference model sporting a very unique design, which may be an indicator of things to come.