Intel has officially announced its new Core Series 3 Wildcat Lake processors aimed at the entry-level market and aiming to bring 40 TOPS of AI performance, better GPU and CPU performance, as well as significantly lower power, leading to an all-day battery life.
Built on Intel’s 18A node, the new Wildcat Lake SoC features two dies, with the first featuring a hybrid 6-core CPU core configuration with two Cougar Core P-cores and four Darkmont LPE cores. The same die features a GPU with two Xe3 cores and an NPU 5, which adds up to around 40 TOPS of hybrid AI performance, Xe display and media engine, as well as a memory controller with support for LPDDR5X/DDR5 memory, and memory-side cache. The second die is reserved for I/O, with six PCIe Gen 4 lanes, up to two Thunderbolt 4 connections, two USB 3.2, and up to eight USB 2.0, as well as Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0.
Intel is launching a total of six different SKUs, which mostly feature the same 6-core/6-thread CPU with two Xe3 GPU cores, but at different clocks, except for the lone Intel Core 3 304 SKU, which has a 5-core/5-thread configuration with a single Xe3 GPU core, leaving it with lower 24 TOPS AI performance. The entire lineup has a base 15W TDP with maximum turbo power of 35W.
According to Intel’s own benchmarks, you are looking at up to 2.1 times faster productivity, up to 2.7 times faster AI performance, and better power efficiency, at least compared to the Core 7 150U Raptor Lake-U.
Intel is promising over 70 designs from the usual suspects, which should challenge Apple’s recently announced MacBook NEO, at least if those manage to fit in the same price range.
