Intel's upcoming Wildcat Lake low-budget CPUs leak out again — OEM confirms specs for Core 7 350, Core 5 320, & Core 3 305 in first retail product datasheet

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All SKUs featuring 15W TDPs with 2P+4LPE cores.

Advantech's MIO-5356 SBC
(Image credit: Advantech)

Intel has been working on its Wildcat Lake CPUs for a while now, but it's only recently that we've started to get numerous leaks surrounding this family. A couple of weeks ago, we covered the Core 5 304, which appeared on Geekbench and was twice as fast as its predecessor. Today, an OEM by the name of Advantech has indirectly confirmed specs for three more SKUs as part of the first official, commercially available Wildcat Lake product.

Advantech's MIO-5356 SBC

(Image credit: Advantech)

Wildcat Lake is expected to use the Cougar Cove architecture for P-cores and Darkmont for LP-E cores, which would bring it to parity with Panther Lake. That's why this series is supposed to be branded under the Core 300 family, just without the "Ultra" moniker. Wildcat Lake is the successor to Twin Lake, which itself was a refresh of Alder Lake-N; both of those only had Gracemont E-cores.

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The MIO-5356 has other niche features such as EdgeBMC remote management, dual LAN ports powered by Intel i210 and i226 controllers, CAN-FD communication protocol, GPIO pins, LVDS support, and more. This board also comes with support for up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR5-6400 memory, though the block diagram only shows a single channel (which actually lines up with previous leaks).

Advantech's MIO-5356 SBC

(Image credit: Advantech)

Now, to be clear, prior reports have already revealed the full Wildcat Lake family — we're expecting six SKUs in total — but they weren't seen in a retail product till now, and that signals a launch is due soon. Advantech's datasheet says "preliminary," which means these specs could change between now and then. Regardless of the specifics, it's exciting to see efficient low-power CPUs again that'll likely be cheap enough to prop up an answer to the MacBook Neo.

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Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • usertests
    At least the detail about dual-channel memory is clearly wrong.

    However, this new leak could be pointing to a 10W cTDP for all Wildcat Lake SKUs, which could be good enough for fanless/low-power devices. The Alder Lake-N/Twin Lake minimum was 6-7W depending on SKU.

    The prevalence of 304/305 with half the graphics remains to be seen. Alder Lake-N quad-cores with reduced graphics were the most popular and affordable SKUs.
    Reply
  • Gururu
    Too many SKUs giving me a headache. I guess if you are buying one of these pre-builts, may not care what is in it.
    Reply
  • usertests
    Gururu said:
    Too many SKUs giving me a headache. I guess if you are buying one of these pre-builts, may not care what is in it.
    If you're reading Tom's, you already know too much.

    But if it's not enough, you just look up the SKUs for that generation to find out that the Ryzen AI 7 445 is a hidden disgrace with 8 MiB of L3 cache, or the Core 7 360 is a lowly Cat.
    Reply
  • usertests
    Now, to be clear, prior reports have already revealed the full Wildcat Lake family — we're expecting six SKUs in total
    As of today, we're up to eight so far. Here they are:

    Intel Core 7 360: 2P + 4LPE + 2Xe3, 4.8 GHz P-core turbo, SIPP
    Intel Core 7 350: 2P + 4LPE + 2Xe3, 4.8 GHz
    Intel Core 5 330: 2P + 4LPE + 2Xe3, 4.6 GHz, SIPP
    Intel Core 5 320: 2P + 4LPE + 2Xe3, 4.6 GHz
    Intel Core 5 315: 2P + 4LPE + 2Xe3, 4.4 GHz
    Intel Core 3 310: 2P + 4LPE
    Intel Core 3 305: 2P + 4LPE + 1Xe3, 4.4 GHz
    Intel Core 3 304: 1P + 4LPE + 1Xe3, 4.3 GHz

    SIPP is an enterprise feature package, so you could regard those as the "Pro" SKUs.

    Not much is known about the Core 3 310 yet, but it's probably similar to the 315 or 305.

    Intel is using the single-threaded performance to justify their naming scheme. For Wildcat Lake, they've dropped "Ultra", but the P-core turbo aligns with similarly named Panther Lake parts:

    Core Ultra 7 365 = 4.8 GHz
    Core Ultra 7 355 = 4.7 GHz
    Core Ultra 5 335 = 4.6 GHz
    Core Ultra 5 332 = 4.4 GHz
    Core Ultra 5 325 = 4.5 GHz
    Core Ultra 5 322 = 4.4 GHz

    Theoretically, you can get better single-threaded performance from a Core 7 360 than a Core Ultra 5 322. But Wildcat Lake has half the L3 cache of these parts, less memory bandwidth, etc. so it's not always a direct comparison.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Block diagram shows M-key M.2 slot connectivity is just x2.
    🤮
    I guess it's not too bad, if it's PCIe 4.0. Alder Lake-N had only PCIe 3.0, but it could do x4, depending on the implementation.

    I hope it can do in-band ECC.
    Reply
  • usertests
    bit_user said:
    Block diagram shows M-key M.2 slot connectivity is just x2.
    🤮
    Is the block diagram showing us what Wildcat Lake is capable of, or how Advantech has chosen to allocate the available lanes for its product line?

    Going from 9x PCIe 3.0 lanes to 6x PCIe 4.0 lanes means that Wildcat Lake has 33% more bandwidth to spare, but tough choices will need to be made about how to use the lanes. Switching from PCIe 3.0 x4 to PCIe 4.0 x2 is an obvious way to claw back 2 lanes without changing the maximum storage speed from the previous generation.

    But I assume other products could be using PCIe 4.0 x4 for an SSD. Laptops in particular probably don't need to support the variety of I/O that an industrial board does.
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    Just how 'bad' are these LPE cores? Or how meaningful is the differentiation between E and LP-E when both use Darkmont designs? Does that imply any functional differentiation or is it just about clocks (or marketing)?

    On the bigger Panther Lake designs, I guess it determines which chiplet holds them, here I'm guessing Intel is using a monolithic "CCD" and an "IOD" (two visible chips on the carrier).

    From an Atom point of view, it's nice to have P cores added.

    From an APU point of view, it seems very meagre, while I'm sure it will carry an Intel price tag, which makes it more expensive than entry level notebook variants.

    My cheapest (less than €200 last June) Topton Zen3 5825U (6nm TSMC) Mini-ITX board with 8 SMT P cores likely will lose single core races against this one, but as soon as a few more cores need to turn 15 Watts into a maximum of compute, I'm less sure this will win, while the Ryzen APU also has plenty more in terms of I/O and PCIe lanes, two SO-DIMM sockets and most likely a much more powerful iGPU.

    On the flip side the AMD won't work on passive cooling, 15 Watts means something rather different for those two.

    As for Neo competition, mostly it might not be cheaper.

    But you really need to look towards mobile ARM chips for Neo competition, stuff used for making Android tablets.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    usertests said:
    Is the block diagram showing us what Wildcat Lake is capable of, or how Advantech has chosen to allocate the available lanes for its product line?
    Fair point. It does look more like the latter (i.e. Adantech's implementation) than the former (i.e. the SoC's capabilities).

    usertests said:
    Going from 9x PCIe 3.0 lanes to 6x PCIe 4.0 lanes means that Wildcat Lake has 33% more bandwidth to spare, but tough choices will need to be made about how to use the lanes. Switching from PCIe 3.0 x4 to PCIe 4.0 x2 is an obvious way to claw back 2 lanes without changing the maximum storage speed from the previous generation.
    Very few boards that I looked at actually devoted x4 to the M.2 slot. ODROID's H4 did, but only if you weren't using the SATA ports. Those boards lacked other things, like support for Wifi/Bluetooth. To get that, you had to use a USB adapter.
    Reply
  • usertests
    abufrejoval said:
    Just how 'bad' are these LPE cores? Or how meaningful is the differentiation between E and LP-E when both use Darkmont designs? Does that imply any functional differentiation or is it just about clocks (or marketing)?
    I think the big difference is that the Darkmont LPE cores are unlikely to have any access to the L3 cache, so they will be accessing main memory often. This is not confirmed yet, but should be the case for all previous LPE cores as far as I know. So they will be very fast in some situations (better IPC than Raptor Lake, with turbo clocks comparable to Alder Lake-N and Twin Lake), but could fall flat in others.

    Chips and Cheese has done some testing of LPE cores, showing some of the effects of no L3 cache:
    Comparing Crestmonts: No L3 Hurts
    It appears that Wildcat Lake only has 6 MiB of L3 cache, which is half of the low power Panther Lake parts, but the same amount as Alder Lake-N. Alder Lake-N shared 6 MiB between up to 8 E-cores, but here we'll probably see that shared only between the 1-2 P-cores.
    abufrejoval said:
    On the flip side the AMD won't work on passive cooling, 15 Watts means something rather different for those two.
    The block diagram points to Wildcat Lake working at as low as 10 Watts. Which was necessary to even begin to consider this a drop-in replacement for Alder Lake-N.
    abufrejoval said:
    As for Neo competition, mostly it might not be cheaper.

    But you really need to look towards mobile ARM chips for Neo competition, stuff used for making Android tablets.
    MacBook Neo is currently a $600 product, or $500 with the education discount. My prediction is that Wildcat Lake laptops will start as high as $500-600 but be able to migrate to as low as $300-400 over time.

    High DRAM/NAND pricing will suppress the usual price cuts we would expect for Wildcat Lake, but it's a relatively cheap chip with single-channel memory that will be paired with other cheap components. It could be seen as a replacement for Alder Lake-U (+ Refresh) mobile parts that are frequently in a $200-400 price range. But those systems are often using 8 GB of cheaper DDR4 memory and 128-256 GB SSDs.
    Reply
  • Notton
    Is Intel going to keep N3xx around?
    Wildcat is faster, sure, but it loses PCIe lanes compared to its predecessor.
    Quite a few SSD NAS' from 2024 - 2025 manage to utilize all of those lanes without a PCIe switch.
    The Asustor model's that used PCIe switches were very expensive in comparison.
    Reply