Intel’s Core Ultra laptop CPUs have been its flagships ever since it retired the older generational branding scheme and the i3/i5/i7/i9 branding a few years back. The Core Ultra Series 1, Series 2, and Series 3 processors been the ones with the newer CPU and GPU designs, and newer manufacturing technology.
Intel has also offered non-Ultra Core CPUs, but these have never been particularly interesting, mostly because both the Series 1 and Series 2 chips were based on Intel’s old Raptor Lake architecture. Raptor Lake was the code name for 2023’s 13th-generation Core family, and most versions of Raptor Lake were the same silicon used for 2022’s 12th-generation Core CPUs.
But the naming and renaming of Raptor Lake apparently couldn’t last forever. Intel’s new, non-Ultra Core Series 3 processors are new silicon, a return to the days when you could expect high-end and midrange Intel chips to include many of the same advancements despite their performance differences.
“Wildcat Lake” shares some things in common with Panther Lake, but it’s a slower and simpler design.
Credit:
Intel
These new chips are codenamed “Wildcat Lake,” and while there are some commonalities with the Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs (aka Panther Lake), the non-Ultra CPUs use a simpler design with much less computing power.
Each chip uses two silicon tiles: a compute tile that includes a CPU with up to two Cougar Cove P-cores and four Darkmont E-cores; an integrated GPU with one or two of Intel’s latest-generation Xe3 GPU cores; and (usually) an NPU capable of up to 17 trillion operations per second (TOPS). A separate platform controller tile built on an unspecified non-Intel process provides up to two Thunderbolt 4 ports, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0 connectivity, and six PCIe 4.0 lanes for external connectivity. All of the chips support up to 48GB of LPDDR5X-7467, or up to 64GB of DDR5-6400, and use a base power level of 15 W and maximum boost power level of 35 W.
