Intel Wildcat Lake beats A18 Pro
- Intel’s new Core 5 320, part of its Wildcat Lake laptop lineup, surfaced in first PassMark results and topped Apple’s A18 Pro in multi-core. - PassMark lists the Core 5 320 at 15,222 multi-thread points and 4,047 single-thread, with single-core roughly level and multi-core about 21% higher. - Intel launched Wildcat Lake on April 16 for value laptops and says 70-plus designs are coming. (intel.com)
A processor is the laptop’s engine, and early PassMark results show Intel’s new Core 5 320 ahead of Apple’s A18 Pro in multi-core work. (techpowerup.com) (cpubenchmark.net) The Core 5 320 is part of Intel’s Wildcat Lake family, which Intel formally launched on April 16, 2026 for value laptops, small businesses, schools, and edge devices. (intel.com) Intel’s product listings show the Core 5 320 as a six-core mobile chip with a 4.6 GHz max turbo clock, shipping in the second quarter of 2026. (intel.com) PassMark’s current database lists the Core 5 320 at 15,222 in multi-thread and 4,047 in single-thread. Its comparison page says the Apple A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo is about 21% slower in multi-thread while the two are comparable in single-thread. (cpubenchmark.net 1) (cpubenchmark.net 2) Single-thread scores measure how fast one core handles one task; multi-thread scores show how a chip spreads work across several cores at once. That second number usually matters more for exports, code builds, and heavier multitasking. (cpubenchmark.net) (techpowerup.com) Apple’s A18 Pro, as Apple describes it, uses a six-core central processor with two performance cores and four efficiency cores, plus a 16-core Neural Engine. Apple lists that chip in the iPhone 16 Pro. (support.apple.com) Intel is pitching Wildcat Lake at a different market than its premium Core Ultra chips. The company says the new Series 3 parts bring up to 40 platform tera operations per second for artificial intelligence features and will appear in more than 70 designs in the coming months. (intel.com) These are still early benchmark entries, not a full laptop review. PassMark itself notes that its rankings are built from submitted test results, and scores can move as more systems are tested. (cpubenchmark.net 1) (cpubenchmark.net 2) The immediate read is narrower than “Intel beats Apple” across the board. What the first results show is that Intel’s new budget-laptop chip is already competitive with Apple’s A18 Pro on single-core speed and ahead on this one multi-core test. (cpubenchmark.net)
