It looks like Intel might ditch regular E-cores for its upcoming Core 300 laptop chips

We're only a couple of months off the back of Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 'Panther Lake' laptop chips, which our Andy called "fast, feisty, and fabulous" after extensive testing, and now we've got some concrete specs for a new generation of Intel mobile chips—assuming X user Jaykihn's leaked table is legit, that is. As these things go, this leaker is reliable and often right about these things, so there's good reason to take them seriously.

You might have noticed the lack of an 'Ultra' designator, here, and that's because these chips aren't actually direct successors to Panther Lake ones. Instead, they're low-power ones, meant for thinner and cheaper laptops.

You'll also notice in the reproduced and simplified table above that there's a conspicuous lack of E-Cores—there are only LPE-cores, which are the low power variants. And these LPE-cores will be Darkmont ones, the same that we get in Panther Lake. We'll still be getting some more performant P-cores, of course: two of them alongside four LPE-cores.

That's for all six models listed, from the Core 3 304 up to the Core 7 360. Another spec that's the same for all chips in the line-up is a 35 W turbo TDP (base 15 W). That's far from the TDPs of high-end Panther Lake chips, and is more in line with what we see in some of the best handheld gaming PCs, such as in the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme.

We're also unfortunately only getting a maximum of two Xe graphics cores, at least in these variants, which means they likely won't be as good as the chips in current handheld gaming PCs, so it's unlikely these will be picked for that purpose.

Still, given how much Panther Lake has impressed us on the performance and efficiency front, these Wildcat Lake chips will hopefully make for some mean little efficiency machines—just probably not for anything near serious gaming.

There's also the chance that further models could launch which do have more Xe cores, with an X designator such as a Core 7 360X, just as we have with Panther Lake chips.

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