When I wrote the Year 2025 in review post, I expected an announcement for the Wildcat Lake CPUs at CES 2026, but instead, Intel initially introduced the high-end Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” family.
I assumed the Wildcat Lake announcement was postponed, but some users’ reports on X indicate the company did demonstrate the new Core Series 3 (no “Ultra” there) “Wildcat Lake” processors as lower-end Core Series 3 “Panther Lake” SKUs.
Intel has yet to disclose part names, and there’s nothing about the Wildcat Lake on Intel Ark at the time of writing. However, some information was shared through slides and X users.
Intel Core Series 3 “Wildcat Lake” key features and specifications:
- CPU – Hexa-core processor with 2x Cougar Cover P-cores (Performance cores), 4x Darkmont LPE-cores (Low-Power Efficient cores)
- GPU – 2x Xe-core Intel Xe3 graphics (no ray tracing, not designed for gaming)
- AI accelerator – Intel NPU 5; combined CPU+GPU+NPU AI performance: up to 40 TOPS
- System Memory
- Up to 7467 MT/s LPDDR5x
- Up to 6400 MT/s DDR5
- Connectivity (diagram implies on the “Platform controller tile”, likely just the interfaces TBC)
- Intel Wi-Fi 7 (R2)
- Intel Bluetooth Core 6.0
- USB/Thunderbolt
- Up to 2x Thunderbolt 4
- 2x USB 3.2
- 8x USB 2.0
- PCIe – 6 lanes PCIe Gen4
- Power Usage (or is it TDP/PBP?) – 9 to 25W
- Manufacturing Process – Intel 18A
Like the Alder Lake-N and Twin Lake family, the new Intel Core Series 3/300 mobile SoCs will be found in budget laptops, Chromebooks, mini PCs, and likely some single board computers and embedded devices.
While the new Wildcat Lake family was announced at CES 2026, Intel did so discreetly, and X users were told the Wildcat Lake devices are “expected to launch during 2026”, so it does not look imminent. I previously read user comments on CNX Software that the family might not be that inexpensive, but Patrick Moore notes they look cost-effective on X (linked above):
Based on the packaging, looks like a very cost-effective solution. And with the Panther Lake architecture. Not full PTL but that misses the point as it’s cost-optimized. This squares right up against Apple’s cost-reduced Macs rumored to use a smartphone processor.
Let’s wait and see. We’ll revisit the family once details are published on Ark, and the first laptops or mini PCs are announced.
Via Liliputing and Hardwareluxx.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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If it’s as cheap as N100 it will be an instant hit
It’s probably asking for too much. If we can have something under $300 at first, it would be a good start especially considering the situation with RAM prices.
It has 2 P-cores, seems like it’s a class above the N100.
I thought that competition was supposed to be about delivering better and better products at the same price. What went wrong?
“Class above” only means anything if you’re comparing items without taking time into account. Our smartphones are “classes above” some Cray supercomputers from years back and the production cost is lower.
You’re right about that. But Alder Lake-N and Twin Lake clearly divided the lineup into low-end “Intel Processor” and higher “Core i3 / Core 3”. Leaked roadmaps have made it appear like Wildcat Lake was being positioned as a more premium product, and its lineup may only carry “Core Series 3” branding.
So the expectation should be great performance at initially “high” Core i3-N305/N300 prices, not N100/N97 prices. There’s no fully loaded $120 Wildcat Lake boxes in our immediate future.
The story might change if they disable some cores. But remember that every single Lunar Lake chip ended up with the full 4 P-cores and 4 LP-E-cores. Wildcat Lake has some similarities to Lunar Lake but is much cheaper.
Adding P-cores looks like the right way to make progress in the low-end, since single-threaded performance is more important to users than having many cores.
This thing is made with Intel 18A, instead of Alder Lake-N’s Intel 7 / Intel 10nm ESF. I bet these two P-cores are exceptionally small.
But pricing is going to be higher than some of the dirt cheap prices seen before, and Intel can continue making Twin Lake.
With 6 PCIe lanes, pretty much unusable for networking devices, ADL-N has 10 lanes and that is already limiting
Since it’s PCIe Gen4, a cheap PCIe switches would make it usable. I wonder what will the prices be when ASM58000 series release.
I think alder lake-n has 9 lanes not 10
But yeah, theoretically the pcie bandwidth increases from 9 lanes gen 3.0 (9x8GT/s) to 6 lanes gen 4.0 (6x16GT/s) theoretically by 33% but it can result in some wasted bandwidth.
And the bump doesn’t look that good. Previously you could connect connect 4 NVME ssd’s using 1 late for each one, and still have 5 for networking. Right now without using expensive IC’s if you’ll do it, you will get better performance, but it will leave you with 2 lanes for networking and the rest.
I wonder, does using the thunderbolt consume the PCIE lanes, or is it a seperate pool?
Modern 10GbE NICs like RTL8127 are using 4.0×1 configuration
9 PCIe 3.0 lanes for ADL-N. 6 PCIe 4.0 lanes has more bandwidth. Maybe it’s less flexible from the lower count.
I wonder will the memory controller will be 1 channel like on alder lake-n or 2 channel?
Ian Cutress said it was single-channel. Source: uOEWQJ8aJdg on YouTube, 49:04.
Alder Lake-N limited both DDR5 and LPDDR5 to 4800 MT/s. So you’re looking at up to 33-56% more bandwidth with Wildcat Lake. Also without the cheap DDR4-based designs that had even less bandwidth.
I kinda guessed so, if it was going to ve dual channel they would definitely mention it on the slides.
So yeah, faster memory is nice, but honestly this chip looks very “meh”. It will depend on the pricing, for 100$? Yeah take my money, for 200$? Thank you I’ll pass.
If you’re able to get the whole thing with memory and storage for $200, it’ll probably be worth it.
Alder Lake-N:
Wildcat Lake:
$200 is wishful thinking at this point, as it will start out closer to $300-400.
You can find i3-1315U laptops for nearly $200 in the US. Wildcat Lake may be faster than those, or at worst a sidegrade (lacks dual-channel memory).
i think we wont see this until late 2027 but i have no doubts that panther lake will be bad compared to Zen 6 so wont be a problem
Nah, they would have announced it a year from now if was going to be appearing that late. It will probably start showing up in devices by Q2 2026 at the latest.
It might take until late 2027 for it to be something you actually want to buy, i.e. memory prices come down, and it gets more design wins that people are looking for (like a MeLe or ODROID-H5 or something).
I would think that the N100 competetor for this generation will be held back for a long time. The current issues with memory prices would cripple the cost effectiveness of such systems–what’s the point of a cheap CPU SoC if you have to pay several times that cost for a small amount of memory?
If anyone has access to sales data, I would expect that what is happening in this segment right now will strongly influence Intel’s launch timing.
It’s true, however devices in the N100 class are not only about being cheap but also being low power and able to run fanless, which is really sought in a number of embedded environments where performance is not the primary goal. So they might as well decide to emit comparable chips with limited cores count and frequency and sell them as super-efficient chips at quite a high price, like they used to do for high-end tablets in the past!