The Dell XPS 13 with Intel Wildcat Lake has hit the market and, according to testing by The Verge, has become the first direct competitor to Apple's MacBook Neo. The unit tested featured the new six-core Intel chip, 8 GB of RAM and integrated graphics with two GPU cores, in a configuration Dell calls 'essential.'
In Geekbench 6 benchmarks, the Wildcat Lake scored 2,581 points in single-core and 7,615 in multi-core, beating Qualcomm's Snapdragon X X1-26-100, which hit 2,348 and 9,421 respectively. Apple's A18 Pro, found in the MacBook Neo, leads in single-core with 3,402 and multi-core with 8,508. In GPU tests, the Intel Graphics with two cores scored 12,875 points on OpenCL, compared to 9,554 for the Snapdragon and 19,798 for the A18 Pro.
The XPS 13 also ran tests in Premiere Pro at 4K, where the Wildcat Lake showed competitive video-editing performance but fell short of Apple. Dell justifies the 8 GB of RAM as enough for daily use, but the limited memory could bottleneck users running multiple containers or heavy development environments.
For systems operators, the key takeaway is that Intel has delivered a chip efficient enough to compete with Apple in ultrathin laptops. Anyone managing laptop fleets for engineering teams should note that the Wildcat Lake offers good value for single-core tasks, but its integrated GPU still lags behind the A18 Pro for local machine-learning workloads.
The Week in Tech considers the Dell XPS 13 with Wildcat Lake a realistic option for users needing mobility and solid processing power, provided workloads do not demand much graphics muscle. The choice between Intel and Apple now hinges more on the software ecosystem — and less on raw performance differences, which have narrowed.