Intel's Project Firefly creates sub-$600 laptops to compete with Apple's MacBook Neo — leverages China's smartphone manufacturing blueprint to produce affordable Wildcat Lake systems

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The sub-$600 laptop wave is coming.

Core Series 3 (Wildcat Lake) CPU
(Image credit: Intel)

Apple’s MacBook Neo has redefined how we view budget laptops and has easily earned a spot on our list of best laptops. But Windows fans may finally see some competition with their go-to OS. Intel held a Core Series 3 processor (codenamed Wildcat Lake) launch event in China today, and alongside the launch came the announcement of Project Firefly (via ITHome). Project Firefly is an initiative to challenge the MacBook Neo by leveraging China’s efficient smartphone supply chain, allowing manufacturers to mass-produce Wildcat Lake-powered devices at the lowest possible cost.

When it comes to laptops, every vendor does its own thing with design and componentry. Project Firefly aims to revolutionize the process by streamlining laptop design and manufacturing, taking inspiration from the smartphone industry. In the world of smartphones, companies utilize standardized components and modular designs. Project Firefly wants to apply this model to laptops by introducing a universal standard and potentially smaller interfaces that manufacturers can use across different brands and models.

Factories can churn out millions of units with remarkable speed and cost-effectiveness. The new model should significantly drive down research, development, and production costs.

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Project Firefly specifically targets the budget segment of the laptop market. Its impact will be noticeable in laptops equipped with Intel’s new Core Series 3 chips, not to be confused with the more premium Core Ultra Series 3 (codenamed Panther Lake) lineup. Announced last month, Wildcat Lake, which is based on Intel’s 18A process node, features between five and six Cougar Cove P-cores, notably without Hyper-Threading support.

Gao Song, Intel’s Vice President and General Manager of Software Engineering and Client Products, took the stage at the Wildcat Lake launch event in China to showcase a Project Firefly reference design laptop. The device immediately turned heads with its vibrant orange exterior, displaying the Intel Color branding on the top cover. The reference model flaunts a lightweight and thin profile (0.43 inches or 11mm) with a minimalist “Clean-D” design, as Intel calls it.

Intel’s partners, including major players like Asus, HP, and Honor, have already begun rolling out their Wildcat Lake-powered laptops in the Chinese market, with pre-tax prices ranging from $571 to $662. Chinese manufacturer Chuwi has also introduced the UniBook, which comes in at an especially aggressive MSRP of $449. However, it’s important to note that while these laptops benefit from the new Wildcat Lake platform, they are not products of Project Firefly. The very first laptop to arrive under Project Firefly will be Lenovo’s upcoming Lecoo Air 14.

Besides taking on Apple’s MacBook Neo, Project Firefly will also challenge Arm-powered laptops and Chromebooks, which are also aimed at budget-conscious consumers. If Intel succeeds in delivering high-quality, affordable laptops through Project Firefly, it. would offer buyers the option to stay within their x86 comfort zone.

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Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
News Editor, RAM Reviewer & SSD Technician

Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • usertests
    Starting prices look pretty bad. Get Alder Lake-U (aka Raptor Lake-U, same thing) on sale instead.

    The actual performance of Wildcat Lake is very good. On PassMark, the Core 7 350 is currently +21% ST, +31% MT vs. the Core 3 100U (with similar 2+4 cores), with its multi-threaded performance sitting between an i7-9700K and i9-9900K. Subject to change due to low sample size, but it has clearly surpassed the bottom-of-the-barrel Raptor Lake-U offerings in CPU performance, and has some extra features thrown in, like newer video decode/encode, and a slow NPU. Presumably with substantially better power efficiency.

    Graphics performance will be low, but it can probably match, maybe even beat, the 12th gen Intel UHD Graphics 64EUs.

    Core 3 305 only has one Xe3 core, and Core 3 304 has only one Xe3 core and one P-core. Those should be avoided unless the price drops steeply. That $449 Chuwi UniBook? It's using the Core 3 304.
    Reply
  • Notton
    Gao Song, Intel’s Vice President and General Manager of Software Engineering and Client Products, took the stage at the Wildcat Lake launch event in China to showcase a Project Firefly reference design laptop. The device immediately turned heads with its vibrant orange exterior, displaying the Intel Color branding on the top cover. The reference model flaunts a lightweight and thin profile (0.43 inches or 11mm) with a minimalist “Clean-D” design, as Intel calls it.
    So, uhh... can I see it?

    If Tom's isn't getting permission to post the image, they could at least link to the source, ya know?
    Reply
  • Jabberwocky79
    "...in laptops equipped with Intel’s new Core Series 3 chips, not to be confused with the more premium Core Ultra Series 3..."

    That's just it. If a statement like this is needed, then your branding is confusing and needs to be rethought LOL
    Reply
  • usertests
    Jabberwocky79 said:
    "...in laptops equipped with Intel’s new Core Series 3 chips, not to be confused with the more premium Core Ultra Series 3..."

    That's just it. If a statement like this is needed, then your branding is confusing and needs to be rethought LOL
    How many laptop buyers have any clue what's inside, other than Intel and maybe a somewhat differentiating 3, 5, 7, or 9? Or the price could be a proxy for quality, since even someone who knows literally nothing is likely to be correct that a $1800 laptop is faster/better than a $600 one.
    Reply
  • das_stig
    So basically welcome back the Netbook 2026 edition, cut down to lowest spec posisble, crippled cpu, 256Gb storage, 8GB ram 12in screen, onboard gpu from how many generations back, tacky plastic, 4 hour battery and a keyboard and trackpad that makes you want to puke eveyrtime you touch it, and the lies from the PR dept from all involved how great. they are to sell them. No expert on American pricing, but $600 laptops not currently available in that range?
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    das_stig said:
    So basically welcome back the Netbook 2026 edition, cut down to lowest spec posisble, crippled cpu, 256Gb storage, 8GB ram 12in screen, onboard gpu from how many generations back, tacky plastic, 4 hour battery and a keyboard and trackpad that makes you want to puke eveyrtime you touch it, and the lies from the PR dept from all involved how great. they are to sell them. No expert on American pricing, but $600 laptops not currently available in that range?
    I expect the battery life to be much better. These should be capable of fanless design, and the 18A should be rather efficient if battery life reports of panther are accurate, this is a cut down small power optimized design as well. I would also expect 15+ hours.

    The real issue is storage and ram. As long as the ssd can be upgraded (M.2 of any size), I would go for 256gb for now. The ram is more serious issue as usually they are soldered on and that means paying more for a more premium 16/32gb model then the base 8gb model. If there are sodimm models released though, personally would go cheapest knowing in a year or two I could max it out once this bubble pops for pennies.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    This is making me think of netbooks and ultrabooks. Prepare for a glut of identically configured laptops from all the major system vendors. The worst part of the netbook and ultrabook lines was the near-complete lack of customization or differentiation. I really hate it when Intel forces these kind of things onto the market.

    I remember there was 1 netbook -- the Asus 1201N -- that showed what a netbook could be. Dual-core Atom with Nvidia Ion? That stupid little thing could play Crysis! I know because I had one and I played Crysis on it! But Intel didn't want the 1201N to exist, drove the price of that system up way higher than it should have been, and then eventually all netbooks got destroyed by the Apple and Android tablets.

    I do not want to see Intel play its games again. Make parts, sell parts, and let the market figure out what works instead of forcing us all into the ultrabook 2.0 firefly platform.
    Reply
  • User of Computers
    usertests said:
    Starting prices look pretty bad. Get Alder Lake-U (aka Raptor Lake-U, same thing) on sale instead.

    The actual performance of Wildcat Lake is very good. On PassMark, the Core 7 350 is currently +21% ST, +31% MT vs. the Core 3 100U (with similar 2+4 cores), with its multi-threaded performance sitting between an i7-9700K and i9-9900K. Subject to change due to low sample size, but it has clearly surpassed the bottom-of-the-barrel Raptor Lake-U offerings in CPU performance, and has some extra features thrown in, like newer video decode/encode, and a slow NPU. Presumably with substantially better power efficiency.

    Graphics performance will be low, but it can probably match, maybe even beat, the 12th gen Intel UHD Graphics 64EUs.

    Core 3 305 only has one Xe3 core, and Core 3 304 has only one Xe3 core and one P-core. Those should be avoided unless the price drops steeply. That $449 Chuwi UniBook? It's using the Core 3 304.
    are you kidding me? this blows ADL-U out of the water in every metric. ADL-U (and its refreshes) were ugly duckling generations between the excellent TGL-U and MTL-U, both of which are far better SoCs wrt low-power laptops. ADL-U suffers from "golden cove is a terrible core for power efficiency" syndrome, in which those 2 P-cores will suck upwards of 12W each. Even at half the price ADL-U should not be in consideration in any way. Just get TGL-U instead, it's a far better designed SoC as far as idle power and low power use is concerned.
    Reply
  • User of Computers
    das_stig said:
    So basically welcome back the Netbook 2026 edition, cut down to lowest spec posisble, crippled cpu, 256Gb storage, onboard gpu from how many generations back, 4 hour battery.
    uhh... I don't know if I'd call WCL a "crippled CPU". Those P-cores can put in some work, and the E-cores are around Golden Cove IPC (which, may I remind you, is the P-Core underpinning the majority of their fab volume as we speak). Can't speak for the build quality of these things though, I bet you're right that they're gonna go with some plastic fantastic designs.
    Reply
  • usertests
    User of Computers said:
    Even at half the price ADL-U should not be in consideration in any way.
    I can deal with the lower efficiency, don't care that much about it. ADL-U has decent performance, and dual-channel, upgradeable DDR4 in some of the cheapest models.

    For about $320 total, I was able to buy a cheap i3-1315U laptop and used 32 GB DDR4-3200 SODIMM, for 40 GB total (flex mode). Works great and leaves me very uninterested in the gimped, entry-level Wildcat Lake SKUs (inevitably paired with 8 GB non-upgradeable memory), namely the Core 3 304 and 305. The full die at $600+ is also too much, and I'd probably look into Krackan Point instead (i.e. the Ryzen AI 7 350). Though it's less attractive than when it was available sub-$500.

    I have been enthusiastic about Wildcat Lake, its multi-threaded performance exceeded what I predicted, and I acknowledge that it will be very efficient. But I don't value it at 2x of an ADL-U laptop. I got this for someone else but ended up using it after plans changed. Now I can wait a few years for better APUs to arrive, and hopefully memory crisis relief.

    Intel needs a reality check for their "MacBook Neo" chip. Maybe AMD will attempt to compete with "Bumblebee" (2+2+2 Zen 6 cores) next year. That would be a good opportunity to deploy "RDNA4m" into "budget" laptops, and finally put Mendocino to rest.
    Reply