Hot Chips 2026: Intel’s Wildcat Lake

Intel’s Core Ultra series has done well with improving battery life and performance in mobile products. Wildcat Lake, or Core Series 3, aims to take those qualities and bring them into a lower cost product. Wildcat Lake brings in all the new technologies present in the Core Ultra series, rather than making an incremental change off the N and U series that had filled out Intel’s past low cost offerings. That includes new IO, new CPU cores, and the Xe3 graphics architecture for the GPU. But optimizing for low cost goes beyond taking those major IP blocks and picking the right core counts. That’s what Intel’s presentation is about.Intel’s Ultra-series processors use advanced packaging technology to avoid creating a large, difficult-to-yield monolithic die. As far back as Meteor Lake, Intel has been using small dielets that yield better. Core Ultra 3 in the more recent generation features two different compute dies and two graphics dies that can be mixed and matched as needed. That scheme…