This suggests Wildcat Lake will be tiny only 2P+4E.
So gaming on it would be a mistake, even if you're the sort who doesn't mind keeping settings low enough for an iGPU.
Wildcat Lake is a replacement for Alder Lake-N (N100, N305, etc).
In single-thread, a Cougar Cove P-core boosting to 4.0-5.0 GHz or whatever will slap the shit out of the N355's Gracemont E-core at 3.9 GHz. I think it will have double the ST, if not more. It will finally move performance way beyond the Skylake era, and be more comparable to lower-clocked Golden Cove, or better. Hybrid/heterogeneous will be massive for Atom.
The node is moving from Intel 7 (10nm Enhanced SuperFin) to Intel 18A which should be great for power efficiency and allow the P-cores to clock relatively high. Don't expect for it to have backside power delivery, which is an optional and more expensive feature of the 18A node.
Multi-thread. I think it's more like 2P+
4LPE. The lines could be blurred depending on how the LPE cluster handles L3 cache. Darkmont will be a minor IPC bump compared to Skymont, but Skymont brought huge integer/floating IPC increases over Gracemont/Crestmont. I guess it could be 50-100% faster than the N355 overall with its 6 threads total (no P-core hyperthreading). If the LPE-cores can't use L3 cache,
that will be a weak point because of many L2 cache misses.
The leak says 2 Xe3 cores. It's tough to guess the performance increase here but I think anywhere from +100-200% is plausible, with clock speeds playing a big role. Lunar Lake clocks Xe2-LPG cores at 1.85-2.05 GHz depending on the SKU. Alder Lake-N is Xe1-LP at 750 MHz in the N100, 1.35 GHz in N350/N355. 18A node should help a lot here. Faster LPDDR5X memory support could help, but the real deal would be having dual-channel memory again. No word on that yet.
32 EUs Xe1-LP is a low starting place, but double/triple that is a big improvement that will be good for le older games and emulators.
Other features: It's going to have an 18 TOPS NPU, so, trash. It should have AV1 encode and H.266/VVC decode. Maybe the media engine is newer than Lunar Lake, idk.
Add it all up and it will be great for the low-end. There's one problem though: segmentation. Alder Lake-N is an 8-core die with the majority of products disabled to 4-core N100/N95coof/N97/N200. There's even a dual-core for the embedded market.
Are they going to disable down to 1P+3LPE? For graphics, I guess they can only slash it in half to 1 Xe3 core. The hopium on this is it could be more like
Lunar Lake which enabled all CPU cores on all SKUs, but disabled from 8 Xe cores to 7 Xe cores on the bottom half of the lineup. Yields on these tiny dies should be very high.
