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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vishal_ec - Friday, September 13, 2013 - link
what do you mean by "The memory interface is fairly ridiculous by mobile standards."MacrosTheBlack - Saturday, September 14, 2013 - link
While not a graphics powerhouse, do you think games like Warcraft 3, Age of Empires 2 HD, and many of the games on gog.com will run okay on Bay Trail?Muyoso - Sunday, October 6, 2013 - link
This is my biggest question. Can't wait to see how something like the Asus T100 will handle some older and indie games.Integr8d - Sunday, September 15, 2013 - link
Anand/Brian, any thoughts on how this might alter the NAS landscape, properly implemented?fteoath64 - Monday, September 16, 2013 - link
I was wondering similarly. But nah. No integrated SATA controllersl. Even AMD does not seem interested in the NAS market. To make a low-end to mid-end x86 for NAS would need good tweaking for dual channel RAM, integrated SATA (4 or 6 ports), integrated USB3 and lock standard 64MB Vga frame buffer. It should be low cost and flexible enough but Marvell is catching up to the aging Atom solutions which are no longer lower power ....Tangey - Monday, September 16, 2013 - link
the article is wrong when stating baytrail no longer using IMG video decode. Intels own datasheet shows it has IMG's VXD392 video decode block, which can decode 4K streams.(see 2nd table in the link)
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/4th-gener...
SanX - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
I do not care if T-Rex is at 15 Hertz even less, make me 6" Windows 8 Pro phablet now, this chip has already good enough performance for that. Windows 8 Pro phablet NOW, damid!tipoo - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
It would be nice to see a Core 2 in the actual review, as a suggestionsireangelus - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
Hey guys.. i was wondering.. what if atom is the next "core"? I mean, looking back at the P IV> centrino>core revolution, what if we are going to see a core>atom revolution where atom will catch up and surpass core performances but with much lower power consumption?AB_Competitive - Monday, April 21, 2014 - link
On your comment on Sept 2013: " 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."It is April 2014, seven months later and there are no commercial Android tablets using Bay Trail....so much for a good Intel processor....