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Intel’s low-cost Wildcat Lake processors could be an excellent counter to Apple’s affordable MacBook Neo, powered by its A18 Pro iPhone chip. In early Passmark testingthe Intel Core 5 320—a mid-range chip in the new lineup—outperformed the MacBook Neo by as much as 27% in a multi-threaded benchmark. Although its single-threaded performance couldn’t quite keep up with the A19 Pro, that’s not a chip you’ll find in the $600 MacBook Neo.If Intel can get the prices of Wildcat Lake laptops down low enough, it could have a winner.
Credit: Intel
Intel’s WildCat Lake CPUs are based on its Cougar Cove performance cores and Darkmont low-power efficiency core, skipping its usual efficiency cores to maximize battery life and performance on the leaner number of P cores. But the approach seems effective. With just two Performance cores and four LPe cores, the Core 5 320 achieved a Passmark score of 15,222, while the Apple A18 Pro, itself with six cores, managed just 12,860.It has a much lower 8W TDP than the Wildcat Lake CPU’s 15W, which could make Intel-based laptops less efficient for long-term battery life, but the performance is undeniable.
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There is also some talk of the next-generation Xe3 GPU cores being substantially faster per core than older Lunar Lake designs. In one test, just two Xe3 cores managed a score of 2,746 in Passmark, while a Lunar Lake laptop with 8 Xe2 cores managed 5,133. That’s obviously far faster, but less than double the performance with four times the cores shows how far Xe3 has come in just one generation.Wildcat Lake also comes with faster chips, too. The top-end Core 7 360 has a couple of hundred extra megahertz on the cores (about a 5% increase) and an extra 100MHz on the GPU frequency, too. The first Wildcat Lake laptops are starting to appear in the wild, so we may not have long until we can see what these new chips can really do. If it’s anything like this, they could be seriously impressive for the budget market.
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