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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hp79 - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
I had a terrible experience with those unstable Atom z2760 equipped Samsung XE500T. Although there are good sides, it's a nightmare dealing with all those driver bugs and battery drain. I even tried clean installing my own Windows on it. Eventually, I had to go back to using a older driver for couple things, and turn off the sound, and now it shows less battery drain than before. I don't even know if connected standby is working properly or not, it never really updates anything. It really sucks with intel's buggy drivers. I would wait and watch couple months to see how these work out, but wouldn't expect intel to get any better at their driver support.lmcd - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Intel get better? They were supporting PowerVR graphics (or their old GMAs) so come back when you've got a legitimate complaint.damianrobertjones - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
I'm sorry but I do not believe you. I've owned two 500t tabs and now have a Dell Latitude 10. 'Initially' there were issues but not anymore.Khato - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Were any power consumption numbers observed while running 3D workloads? I'd imagine that it would be lower than the multi-threaded CPU benchmarks, but it'd be a nice data point to have rather than guessing.ddriver - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Nice launch date. Couldn't have picked a better one.Homeles - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
9/11 happened over a decade ago.Myrandex - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
It occurs yearly...Krysto - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
"Tablet SoC" = not efficient enough to be put in smartphones. My rule says if it's not a "smartphone chip", then it's not a "mobile chip". Wake me up when Intel actually launches a smartphone chip that's used in tablets, too.This will get away with it, because tablets have larger batteries, so they think we won't notice it's less efficient.
jeffkibuule - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
That rule makes no sense considering tablets and smartphones are NOT the same thing.Flunk - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
They pretty much are, if you look at current popular tablets. The only real difference is the screen size and if it supports mobile networks (some tablets even do that).