The Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) Review: Acer's W510 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 20, 2012 10:34 AM ESTThe Display
Acer uses an LG sourced 10.1-inch 1366 x 768 IPS panel for the W510. Viewing angles are great as are the rest of the basics. Max brightness is pretty low at just under 300 nits, but the flip side of that coin are very low black levels resulting in great contrast. Compared to the netbooks that Acer was shipping just a few years ago, the W510 is worlds better.
The low max brightness makes the W510 not ideal for use outdoors in bright sunlight:
Color accuracy out of the box isn’t great, but it’s really no worse than something like the Nexus 10 if you look at our CalMAN results.
Once again I turned to our own Chris Heinonen's CalMAN smartphone/tablet workflow. We'll start off by looking at the calibrated white point for these tablets. What you're looking for here is a number close to 6500K:
The next three charts look at accuracy represented as a difference between various source colors and what's reproduced on the display. The results are presented as average dE2000, with lower numbers being better.
First up is Grayscale performance, here we're looking at the accuracy of black, white and 19 shades of gray spread in between the two extremes:
First in our color accuracy tests is a saturation sweep. Here we're looking at 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% saturations of red, blue, green, magenta, yellow and cyan.
Gamut CIE Chart
Saturation CIE Chart
For our final accuracy test we're looking at the difference between a Gretag Macbeth colorchecker chart and the rendered swatches on these displays. Once again, lower numbers are better.
GMB Color Checker
Acer doesn’t really make an effort to calibrate the display at the factory, but there’s not too much room for improvement here based on my calibration passes (I managed to get dE down to the mid 4s compared to the GMB chart). Nothing about the W510’s display really looks bad, but it does lack that extra oomph of Apple’s 3rd and 4th gen iPad with Retina Display. Microsoft did a better job on color accuracy with the panel in Surface RT. On the bright side, the display really is such a huge improvement over what we’re used to seeing from a Windows PC priced at $499.
The relatively small display size means the native resolution isn’t really too much of a problem. More resolution would always be appreciated, but in this case Clover Trail doesn’t really have the GPU to drive it. In my experience with the W510 I didn’t really find myself wishing I had a higher resolution display, although I’d be very surprised if the next-generation of these tablets didn’t ship with something higher res.
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londiste - Friday, December 21, 2012 - link
are the windows x86 drivers for powervr sgx now stable and feature complete? the first batch of reviews for atoms containing these, including the one in anand iirc, complained a lot about the stability of video drivers.the fact that these crashes are system-wide, would rule out specific applications, but not drivers.
windows 8 by itself, especially on x86 (but maybe even more so for the rt on arm) has been very stable.
MFK - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Can we get a detailed write up of how eMMC differs from SATA?I'd be very interested in reading Anandtechs analysis on the differences between them.
It just seems to be the very prevalent now with smartphones and Atom tablets both using it.
DanNeely - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
MMC is a memory card standard similar to the more common SD; eMMC is just an embedded version. Outside of the embedded world MMC is mostly used to increase the number of supported formats claimed by card readers.tempestglen - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6330/the-iphone-5-re...I am very curious about the Z2760 electricity consumption when running kraken.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Working on something even cooler, give me a few days... :)Take care,
Anand
tempestglen - Friday, December 21, 2012 - link
Great! Hope you use a test application which could utilities all of the CPU cores. Kraken is good but not perfect, could Kraken make 100% usage on dual core?DanNeely - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Could you add dimensions for the combined tablet + dock?mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Clover Trail is a failure. It is competitive with Tegra3. Great.But tegra3 itself is outdated now. Anyone notice that no new top-line smartphone has tegra3. All have Krait4. And will soon have Exynos5.
If all Intel has to show for its efforts is competition with tegra3/A9 , its in some deep shit.
The GPU is particulerly shitty. Either Intel need a node shift to 14nm, or a new arch or both.
jhoff80 - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Maybe I'm being naive, but it sounds like Bay Trail will be exactly that new architecture for Atom that Intel needs.jeffkibuule - Thursday, December 20, 2012 - link
Clover Trail is just a stop gap. It's using a 5 year old architecture with a GPU that even the iPad 2 from 2 years ago could outperform. I think it's purposefully designed to be cheap.I'd be far more interested to see what Bay Trail (next-generation Atom) and Haswell (next-generation Core) bring to the table, because at least it will look like Intel is trying.