Intel's Wildcat Lake CPUs For Budget Laptops May Leave Ray Tracing Behind

The next all-new CPUs from Intel should be the Panther Lake series of mobile processors, hitting late this year or (more likely) early next year. Around the same time or shortly after, though, we expect to see Wildcat Lake, a smaller, cheaper-to-make chip intended for low-cost and low-power devices. Wildcat Lake will reportedly come with just two Performance cores, four low-power Efficient cores, and two Xe3 cores.

Despite using the latest version of Intel's graphics IP, however, Wildcat Lake's integrated GPU will apparently completely lack support for ray-tracing acceleration. That detail comes from regular leaker Kepler (@Kepler_L2 on Xwitter), who posted a screenshot of source code of some sort that appears to indicate that Xe3, as implemented on Wildcat Lake, will not have ray-tracing support. See for yourself:


It would be easy to say that this absolutely doesn't matter. A pair of Xe3 cores is probably not far ahead in performance compared to the integrated graphics on AMD's current Ryzen desktop processors, which is to say that it will likely be sufficient for basic desktop use, video playback, and simple 2D games, but certainly not great for 'hardcore' 3D games. Wildcat Lake's GPU is going to be so small that the idea of playing a ray-traced game on it is an absurdity anyway.

Kepler does make the strong argument that doing ISA changes like this on lower-end SKUs is really not great. As he correctly points out, the adoption of Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) was greatly delayed by developers who wanted to avoid locking Pentium and Celeron users out of their software, as those chips lacked the requisite vector instructions. This decision by Intel to remove ray-tracing support on its low-end SoCs could be seen in a similar light; applications could be coded to check for DirectX 12 Ultimate support, and if the GPU doesn't have ray-tracing, it isn't compliant.


It's entirely likely that this isn't simply a software lock-out, though. Intel may literally be cutting the required ray-tracing hardware out of the Xe3 cores, which would save significant die area on a part that's already small, especially considering that Intel's ray-tracing implementation is supposedly the most area-thirsty of the three major graphics vendors. It's definitely true that actually playing ray-traced games simply won't be practical on Wildcat Lake, so it's hard to fault Intel here.

Despite the specifications leaks, we still don't really know much about Wildcat Lake. Arguably a Lakefield successor, Wildcat Lake will purportedly come branded 'Core' rather than adopting the low-end 'Intel Processor' branding. That's a surprise considering its modest core count and small die area. Still, it'll be worth watching how Intel positions and prices it when it finally lands next year.