The Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) Review: Acer's W510 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 20, 2012 10:34 AM ESTWiFi
Connected over the Atom Z2760’s SDIO interface is Broadcom’s 4330 WiFi solution. The 4330 is a single-stream, dual-band (2.4/5GHz) 802.11n device. Wireless performance is reasonable - I was able to pull a maximum of 34Mbps down on a 5GHz network - but not great compared to the likes of the iPad 4 and Nexus 10.
Reception was comparable to most tablets of this size but I have been seeing a weird issue where Windows 8 claims there’s limited connectivity on a known network even if there aren’t any problems. Disconnecting and reconnecting always fixes it. I don’t know if this problem appeared more frequently after one of the latest Windows 8 updates, because I don’t remember having it much when I was testing Surface RT. Occasionally I’ve seen an issue where 5GHz networks won’t appear to the W510 without toggling airport mode. I’ve been chalking these issues up to early Windows 8 problems, but again I don’t remember having them with Surface so it’s unclear how much of this is specific to the W510.
Camera
The W510 features a rear facing 8MP camera (3264 x 2448, 1.4 - 2.5MB compressed JPEG size) and a front facing 2.1MP camera (1920 x 1080, ~600KB compressed JPEG size). Neither is particularly amazing at shooting photos, but like with most tablets the rear facing camera can produce passable results for web use:
Rear facing camera
Rear facing camera
Front facing camera
The camera UI and preview frame rate are both solid for stills, but there is a strange behavior where you’ll get a split second of live view after you’ve taken a shot using the rear camera before you’re shown a preview of the shot you just took.
Video is recorded in Main Profile (4.0) AVC at around 15Mbps with 2-channel stereo audio:
Maintaining 30 fps while shooting 1080p video isn't possible it seems. Video quality is average at best for a tablet using the rear facing camera:
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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.