Intel refreshes non-Ultra Core CPUs with new silicon for the first time

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.

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.