Wildcat Lake Refresh May Replace Intel's Lowest-End Nova Lake Chip

Essentially since the original Atom, there's been a big CPU core and a little CPU core architecture in parallel development at Intel. As a result, there has long been a weird overlap at the lower end of the market, where you could choose a chip with a few big cores or a chip with several small cores, and they traded blows depending on what your goals were. Now that chips usually feature some portion of both, that overlap is even larger, and that's probably why we're now hearing that Intel has allegedly canceled its bottom-tier Nova Lake configuration.


That chip was thought to have six cores. Intended for lower-end mobile devices, the six-core Nova Lake design was thought to use two P-cores, zero E-cores, and the SoC tile's four LP E-cores. Only, it turns out that the refresh of Intel's low-power Wildcat Lake processors will apparently feature a design with four P-cores and four LP E-cores. In that case, the six-core Nova Lake SKU doesn't really make a lot of sense, so it stands to reason that it was canceled.


It's interesting to describe Wildcat Lake Refresh that way—as a Refresh—if that's true, because the current Wildcat Lake family tops out at 2+0+4, or two P-cores, zero E-cores, and four LP E-cores. It's not clear if the current silicon actually supports four P-cores and has two disabled for yields, or if Wildcat Lake Refresh is indeed going to use a revised compute tile with two extra P-cores. In either case, that will make Wildcat Lake very similar to the extant Core Ultra 200V processors, the Lunar Lake family, which also has a 4+0+4 configuration, albeit with a much larger GPU than Wildcat Lake, to say nothing of its on-package memory.


Interestingly, Videocardz took the leak from Jaykihn to its sources inside Intel and was told that Wildcat Lake Refresh will be used as part of the Core Series 4 family. Based on what VCZ was told, it seems Wildcat Lake Refresh will comprise the Core 7 and Core 5 product tiers, while the Core 3 tier will be filled out with original Wildcat Lake silicon. Note that these are "Core" family chips, not "Core Ultra," indicating that Wildcat Lake and its Refresh will likely continue to lack a high-powered NPU that could qualify them for Copilot+ branding.


Based on early benchmarks, Wildcat Lake is a remarkably competitive processor despite its extremely tiny dimensions and very modest specifications. We haven't gotten a Core 300-series machine in for review yet, but we're hoping to get hands on one of these entry-level portables sooner than later, so stay tuned for our benchmarks and analysis when that happens!