Intel responds to MacBook Neo with 21% faster chip intended for similar devices

Apple’s launch of the MacBook Neo – and especially the incredible price/performance balance – sent shockwaves through the Windows world.

Intel has now responded with the launch of a CPU aimed at similar budget laptops. An early benchmark suggests that it is 21% faster than the A18 Pro used in the MacBook Neo …

The price of the MacBook Neo came as a surprise both within and without the Apple world. Even Windows fans were shocked at the value it offered.

I can’t believe it: Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo just lit a monstrous fire under the Windows laptop market — Microsoft better be panicking […] This new low-cost macOS laptop is everything your everyday Joe or Jane would ever need from a computer in 2026.

There was nothing in the Windows laptop world to come anywhere close to the Neo’s combination of hardware quality, performance, battery life and price.

One of the reasons for that has been the lack of a suitable chip to power the Windows equivalent of the Neo. That’s something Intel has reportedly addressed with the launch of the new Wildcat Lake Core 300 chip.

Tweaktown reports that the chip equals the single-threaded performance of the A18 Pro while being 21% faster in a multi-core benchmark.

On PassMark, the new Wildcat Lake chip scored a multi-threaded rating of 15222 and a single-threaded score of 4047. To put it into context, the single-threaded score is not anything to write home about, since the CPU can only boost to 4.6 GHz on the P-cores. However, the multi-core result is impressive, since it leads the Apple A18 Pro by 21%. That is the chip used in the new Apple MacBook Neo! The single-threaded result for the A18 Pro is 4066, which is essentially identical to the Wildcat Lake Core 5 320.

Of course, as Macworld’s Roman Loyola observes, there is a lot more to competing with the Neo than just matching or beating the performance of the chip. Leaving aside macOS versus Windows, it remains to be seen whether the chip matches the A18 Pro when it comes to battery life – and whether Windows PC brands can get anywhere close to the build quality of the MacBook Neo at this kind of price point.

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