Intel’s Core 3 (Wildcat Lake) chips are on the way aiming to replace the Intel N100 – but to be the next budget computing champ they’ll need to match it on price, not just beat it on performance.
At CES in January, Intel barely mentioned its budget chips. This was presumably so all attention and headlines were given to its powerful and pricey ‘Panther Lake’ chips, like the ones powering the revived Dell XPS 14 with Ubuntu (also announced as CES).
Of course, the N100’s popularity was a happy accident anyway, and hawking decently performing budget chips that are as cheap as chips at the same time as your mid-tier and high-end offerings might seem a little counter-inuititve for the company.
Yet, it’s the low-end chips that I’m most intrigued by.
Intel Core 3: Core Specs
The Intel Core 3 (yes, a new naming scheme) is set up as a successor to the Alder Lake-N series (i.e., the Intel N100 I keep mentioning). Intel is building these new low-end chips on its flagship 18A process node (1.8nm) which is an unusual choice1, somewhat.
One upside are the technical changes this top-tier fabrication offers, including in how power is routed through the ‘wafer’. This should resolve the thermal issues that have plagued the N100 in fanless laptops and mini-PCs (a toasty chip that throttles under sustained loads).
Performance wise, Wildcat Lake’s specs seem solid also.
While N100’s efficiency-core-only design is efficient, it is also its bottleneck. The Intel Core 3 switches to a hybrid six-core setup with two ‘Performance’ cores and four ‘Efficiency’ cores. P-cores can deliver more pep through a ‘snap’ of single-thread responsiveness.
The N100 uses single-channel memory (best performance on systems paired with LPDDR5-4800). Core 3 bumps baseline RAM to LPDDR5X-6800, which will improve memory-heavy tasks and the performance of the integrated Xe3 graphics.
But what about AI? Well, Intel touts 40 TOPS for Wildcat Lake. This it’s a combined figure of CPU, GPU, and NPU.
The NPU itself reportedly sits @ 18 TOPS, well below Microsoft’s 40-NPU-TOPS requirement for “Copilot+” status. For Linux users (or Windows users bored of AI encroachments), this needn’t be a major concern.
Similarly, Linux is keeping pace. Wildcat Lake (Core 3) support made it in to Linux 6.18; there’s Xe3 (Celestial) iGPU support in Mesa 25.3; and GCC 16 tuning variables to provide optimised binaries. Code to support the Wildcat Lake NPU on Linux is in the works.
Pricing will be critical
Putting aside the Core 3’s performance benefits, the N100’s (comparatively impressive) performance is only as appealing because of its price. It’s a ‘bang for your buck’ situation. A tricked out N100 mini-PC was cheaper than a mid-tier Raspberry Pi 5.
A chip intended for budget education laptops became the darling of the low-cost computing scene (even power-conscious Proxmox users vibe with it). Turns out good enough and cheap enough is enough to win both hearts and minds!
Take the Radxa X4 single-board computer I covered last year. Powered by an N100, a decent amount of RAM yet available as low as $60. Yes, $60 for a full-blown, capable Intel PC – try telling me that 10 years ago!
Alas, Intel has not revealed pricing for Intel Core 3 chips (at the time of writing this think piece). It is also vague on a firm release date, only saying that Wildcat Lake devices are “expected” during 2026 – that could mean tomorrow or the next time Santa visits.
On the plus side, the chip “looks cost-effective” to industry hawks.
If the Wildcat Lake is to get its claws into the current budget champ’s audience it’ll need to remember that there’s something more killer than raw specs: good value.
- Or not. It may be that 18A yields are poor so the Core 3 gives them a way to to reuse (aka ‘bin’) silicon which doesn’t meet the speeds needed for the more expensive Panther Lake series. ↩︎