The Bay Trail Preview: Intel Atom Z3770 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on September 11, 2013 12:00 PM ESTFinal Words
At its Silvermont disclosure, Intel promised performance better than any other ARM based core in the market today. Looking at our Android results, Intel appears to have delivered on that claim. Whether we’re talking about Cortex A15 in NVIDIA’s Shield or Qualcomm’s Krait 400, Silvermont is quicker. It seems safe to say that Intel will have the fastest CPU performance out of any Android tablet platform once Bay Trail ships later this year.
The power consumption, at least on the CPU side, also looks very good. From our SoC measurements it looks like Bay Trail’s power consumption under heavy CPU load ranges from 1W - 2.5W, putting it on par with other mobile SoCs that we’ve done power measurements on.
On the GPU side, Intel’s HD Graphics does reasonably well in its first showing in an ultra mobile SoC. Bay Trail appears to live in a weird world between the old Intel that didn’t care about graphics and the new Intel that has effectively become a GPU company. Intel’s HD graphics in Bay Trail appear to be similar in performance to the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 in the iPad 4. It’s a huge step forward compared to Clover Trail, but clearly not a leadership play, which is disappointing.
The big unknowns are things like video decode power efficiency, perf and quality of their ISP and idle power efficiency vs. Qualcomm.
Bay Trail looks like a good starting point for Intel in mobile, and the performance of Silvermont makes me excited for Merrifield in phones next year. What Intel needs to do going forward is simply continue to iterate and execute for the next few generations after Bay Trail and it will have a real chance at success in mobile.
My biggest concern is about the design wins we see based around Bay Trail. Although Intel is finally in a spot where it can be in devices on the market, none of those devices thus far have been any good. Bay Trail is attractive enough to garner more design wins for certain, the question is whether or not the quality of those wins will improve as well. In the tablet market there’s the iPad and the Nexus lines that are really the most interesting, and I don’t expect Bay Trail to be in either. Whether or not the quality of the rest goes up this generation and we find a Bay Trail in one of those devices remains to be seen.
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JumpingJack - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
Nope, power consumption would still be too high, AMD has nothing that can really match up in this space. This has been true with Kabini and all prior iterations. This is why there is so few design wins. AMD has a power consumption problem (just as Intel did a few years back).silverblue - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
Perhaps, but the GPU looks to be overkill for the CPU power on offer.Jaguar appears to lack the sort of dynamic L2 power gating we will be seeing with Steamroller which would make sense in low-power situations. Also, it's still a dual-issue front end - highlighted as a possible decent boost to performance. We don't actually know this particular detail as regards Bay Trail; it could very well be dual-issue as well.
monstercameron - Friday, September 13, 2013 - link
not so sure about that bobcat sold fairly well. Also if amd optimized the a4-5000 for tablet scenarios then the power consumption would be closer to atom. notebookcheck reviewed the a4-5000 in the acer e1-522 http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Acer-Aspire-E1... and there web browsing test reached 3:47 hours on a 37Wh battery [equating to a ~10W draw with laptop components]iwod - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
A Few things,Browser Performance, or JavaScript performance are heavily influenced by its VM. And the version it used to test. Not mention these VM has the best tuning on x86 for years. And Safari JS's VM JvascriptCore isn't very optimized for Karken. As shown in www.arewefastyet.com
And i dont argee much the conclusion. While others has been siting Anand as an Pro Intel site. I have often disagree with it. But looking at those results I dont see how on the CPU side is winning anything. At least not against Shield or the upcoming Qualcomm MSM. As i have said the Javascript Benchmarks are not a reliable way to look at it. And all other CPU based performance Intel is either behind or on par. Not winning the benchmarks. So No, the CPU isn't the best performance here.
And on GPU, it concluded with " Intel's HD graphics in Bay Trail appear to be similar in performance to the PowerVR SGX 554MP4 in the iPad 4" I mean unless you are interpreting the results much more differently then what i read i the graph. Then please do explain yourself there. Because I dont read how it is "similar". There are like at least 20% of performance difference.
And if you want to compare with the best of ARM SoC breed coming up in the same time frame ( And actually shipping it )? Wait until Apple announce its A7X coming in the next iPad.
If I may have missed something you explained. Please enlighten me. Otherwise this is a review that is quite pro Intel.
fteoath64 - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
"And if you want to compare with the best of ARM SoC breed coming up in the same time frame ( And actually shipping it )? Wait until Apple announce its A7X coming in the next iPad."Yeah, the A7X is going to look like 50% ahead of Intel HD gpu and will lead the SoC market ingpu performance for the next 2 years AGAIN!.
Krysto - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
50%? Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 are already up to 80 percent faster in some GPU tests. A7X will be 150% faster, if Apple doubles the GPU performance from last year again.Once again Anandtech shows its bias for Intel, when it's saying Bay Trail is even "competitive" with what is/will be available in the same timeframe.
formulav8 - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
You know, I have defended Anand before with people claiming such things, but I can somewhat see what some people mean. Thankfully I rarely come here for any of his stuff, just mainly come to the site for the forums these days.andrewaggb - Friday, September 13, 2013 - link
yeah that's what I see happening as well. I'm seriously considering getting a T100 anyways because it's pretty good value for a windows device... but as good as bay trail is, it's going to be slower than the A7X by a large margin. I think intel aimed too low.Jaybus - Monday, September 16, 2013 - link
I disagree. GPU performance is not the end-all of tablet performance criteria. They can all do 2D fast enough. For everything but games, if it can play video streams smoothly, then it's fast enough. Overall snappiness and responsiveness is more a CPU thing. So, if the power usage is as claimed, then saying that the Intel chip is a contender in the tablet market is more than fair. I don't see how it is bias toward Intel if it is just the simple truth.monstercameron - Friday, September 13, 2013 - link
temash a4-1350 might have it beat.