Intel has taken Panther Lake, grabbed the bits it likes and chopped the rest off for a tiny Wildcat Lake part.
In October, it launched the Panther Lake mobile architecture, and it was tasty for gaming.
Now it is pushing Wildcat Lake, which is basically the same recipe but served in a kitten-sized portion.
Officially, the new parts are called Core Series 3, with no Ultra badge anywhere in sight.
They use the same Cougar Cove P-cores and Darkmont E-cores as Panther Lake, but there are far fewer of them, even in the supposed top model.
The Core 7 360, for example, has two P-cores and four E-cores for a total of six threads.
By comparison, the PTL-powered Core Ultra X7 358H packs four P-cores, eight E-cores and four low-power E-cores, which adds up to 16 threads.
Wildcat Lake is aimed at a different crowd, even if both families are strictly for laptops.
The Core Series 3 range is pitched straight at budget notebooks, which is why the integrated GPU is tiny, with at most two Xe cores.
That is half the cores you get in a Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, and with only six PCIe lanes in WTL’s controller tile, you can forget pairing it with a discrete GPU.
So no, you are not buying a Wildcat Lake laptop for graphics-heavy gaming unless you enjoy disappointment.
Instead, Chipzilla says you will be enjoying “all day battery life and everyday productivity, with up to 2.1x faster creation and productivity, up to 64 per cent lower processor power, and up to 2.7X AI GPU performance versus previous generation Intel Core 7 150U processors.”
Given what Panther Lake can do, the Core Series 3 parts should be capable enough, but it is hard to see mass upgrades landing without some serious nudging.
Laptop prices have climbed due to DRAM and flash supply constraints, and Chipzilla’s multi-tile packaging is not exactly a bargain compared with AMD’s and Qualcomm’s monolithic designs.
Intel does not list prices for its mobile chips because they cannot be bought directly, but every Panther Lake laptop we have seen so far has been anything but cheap.
It will be messy watching a Wildcat Lake machine square up against the MacBook Neo, which starts at $599.
They probably will not compete on price, yet if performance and battery life are clearly better, some buyers might swallow the premium.
