First look: Our hands-on experience with a Wildcat Lake powered Intel reference laptop

Intel slyly unveiled half a dozen laptop CPUs a few days ago. Codenamed Wildcat Lake, they’re essentially Panther Lake parts sans the ‘Ultra’ branding, resulting in noticeably weaker iGPUs, fewer CPU cores and more conservative power limits. They’re essentially meant for thin-and-light laptops that don’t require the full processing power offered by Panther Lake. Notebookcheck spotted a Wildcat Lake laptop in the wild at an Intel event today.

The laptop in question was an Intel reference design with an aluminium chassis and a keyboard that closely resembles a MacBook's. Under the hood, there’s a mysterious Intel CPU with two Cougar Cove P-cores and four Darkmont LPE-cores. It has a PL1 of 17 Watts (22 Watts maximum) and a PL2 of 35 Watts. In fanless systems, the TDP is limited to 11 Watts, and an Intel representative insisted it would be functional even without active cooling. 

Other specs include a 17 TOPS NPU, a 2-core iGPU, and 16 GB of soldered RAM running at an unspecified speed (likely 7467 MT/s). While the CPU cores' layout doesn’t help us zero in on which SKU is shown here, the 17 TOPS NPU tells us it is either the Core 7 360 or Core 7 350, because they’re the only two models that ship with one. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to run any tests on the laptop, but watch this space for our eventual deep-dive into the architecture.