Budget laptops with Intel Wildcat Lake launch for around $450 and up

The Intel Core Series 3 “Wildcat Lake” line of processors are mobile chips designed for budget laptops and mini PCs. First announced in April, they’re now starting to show up in some low-end laptops… although most of the first models announced are either only available in China at launch, or made by Chinese PC makers that don’t have a robust support network for customers in other countries.

Still, it’s likely that we’ll see more Wildcat Lake-powered notebooks in the coming weeks and months.

Chuwi UniBook with Intel Core 3 304

Wildcat Lake chips are based on the same architecture as Intel’s higher-performance Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” chips, and these these new processor should offer similar single-core CPU performance with their pricier siblings. But they have fewer CPU cores, less powerful graphics, and NPUs that fall short of the minimum system requirements for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program.

Still, as budget chips go, they’re a pretty big step up from the Intel Alder Lake-N and Twin Lake chips that have dominated the low-cost laptop and mini PC space in recent years.

One of the first Wildcat Lake laptops expected to be available globally is the Chuwi UniBook, which is a $449 laptop with a 14 inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel IPS LCD display, 8GB of LPDDR5x onboard memory, a 256GB PCIe NVMe 3.0 SSD, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and set of ports that includes HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB Type-C and Type-A ports.

It’s powered by an Intel Core 3 304 processor, which is the least powerful Wildcat Lake processor, with just a single Performance core, four Low-Power Efficiency cores, and single-core graphics. Still, that’ s one more Performance core than you’d get from an Intel Twin Lake processor.

Other Wildcat Lake laptops on the way include at least three models recently introduced for the Chinese market:

The Lecoo Air 14, meanwhile, has an Intel Core 5 315 chip and 12GB of RAM, while the other models listed above have Intel Core 5 320 processors (with two Performance cores, four Low-Power Efficiency cores, and dual-core graphics), 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. So it’s unsurprising that they all cost a bit more than the Chuwi UniBook, with prices (in China) ranging from the equivalent of about $580 to $660. I’d expect similar or higher prices if and when these laptops (or similar models) go on sale in the US.

We can also probably expect to see many more relatively inexpensive laptops with Wildcat Lake chips in the future – Intel has announced a “Project Firefly” initiative that has the chip maker working with Chinese manufacturers with expertise mass producing sm artphones to build affordable laptops based on an Intel reference design for thin and light laptops with Wildcat Lake chips.

Meanwhile, if you’re on the lookout for Wildcat Lake-powered PCs (either because you want one, or want to avoid one when looking for Panther Lake systems), here’s a run-down on the first six chips in the series:

CPU coresP-Core Max FreqGPU coresGPU Max FreqGPU TOPSNPU TOPSCore 7 3606 (2 x P + 4 x LP-E)4.8 GHz22.6 GHz2117Core 7 3506 (2 x P + 4 x LP-E)4.8 GHz22.6 GHz2117Core 5 3306 (2 x P + 4 x LP-E)4.6 GHz22.5 GHz2016Core 5 3206 (2 x P + 4 x LP-E)4.6 GHz22.5 GHz2016Core 5 3156 (2 x P + 4 x LP-E)4.4 GHz22.3 GHz1815Core 3 3045 (1 x P + 4 x LP-E)4.3 GHz12.3 GHz2.315

via VideoCardz

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