Apple's $599 MacBook Neo sent shockwaves through the Windows laptop world, offering a combination of hardware quality, performance, battery life, and price that had no real competitor. Intel has now responded with the Wildcat Lake Core 300, a chip specifically designed for budget laptops in the same category. Early benchmarks suggest the new processor delivers competitive performance against Apple's A18 Pro chip.

Tweaktown's testing shows the Wildcat Lake chip scored 15,222 on PassMark's multi-threaded benchmark, beating the A18 Pro by 21%. The single-threaded score of 4,047 nearly matches Apple's 4,066. However, the Intel chip's P-cores max out at 4.6 GHz, which explains why single-core performance remains comparable rather than dominant.

As Macworld observed, matching the chip is only part of the battle. Windows PC brands will need to deliver build quality and battery life that can compete with Apple's $599 machine — and that's a much taller order than just matching benchmark scores.