The x86 Power Myth Busted: In-Depth Clover Trail Power Analysis
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 24, 2012 5:00 PM ESTGPU Workload
NVIDIA's only performance advantage on the SoC side compared to Clover Trail at this point is in its GPU. Tegra 3's GPU is faster than the high clocked PowerVR SGX 545 in Clover Trail. While we don't yet have final GPU benchmarks under Windows RT/8 that we can share numbers from, the charts below show power consumption in the same DX title running through roughly the same play path.
NVIDIA's GPU power consumption is more than double the PowerVR SGX 545's here, while its performance advantage isn't anywhere near double. I have heard that Imagination has been building the most power efficient GPUs on the market for quite a while now, this might be the first argument in favor of that heresay.
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felixyang - Friday, December 28, 2012 - link
You get the keypoint.st.bone - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
Now that's just out right ignorant on your comment, that's if you even took the time to read the articlejeffkibuule - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
This kind of makes me shake my head as to why a year old SoC was used when Samsung was shipping Exynos 5250 and Qualcomm had APQ8064, heck nVidia has Tegra4 just waiting in the wings for a likely CES announcement (I know why, bad timing).My only hope is that in 2013, ARM and Atom SoCs can support 1080p displays, I don't think I can use anything less without wanting to poke my eyes out.
kyuu - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
Agreed. This article mostly highlights what an out-of-date SoC Tegra3 is, and how bad it is without its companion core. Which is why its so perplexing that Microsoft went with the Tegra 3 for the Surface. I can only guess that Nvidia must be practically giving away Tegra3 nowadays, otherwise I have no idea why anyone would use it.I'm not sure it's a huge win for Intel that Clover Trail beats a mostly obsolete ARM SoC in power use with such an incredibly mediocre GPU.
A more interesting comparison would be between a current-gen Qualcomm chipset and/or Samsung's current-gen Exynos.
kyuu - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
To clarify the second "paragraph", Clover Trail is the one with the mediocre GPU.lmcd - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
They're both mediocre GPUs at this point. Didn't Adreno 225 keep pace with the T3 GPU?jeffkibuule - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
The reasoning for going for Tegra 3 was pretty obvious. They needed a more finalized chip to develop Windows RT against and Tegra 3 was the only thing available. Relying on a faster class of SoCs in the Tegra 4, Snapdragon S4 Pro, or Exynos 5250 would mean delaying the Windows RT version of tablets by several months at least since I doubt development would have been done in time.lmcd - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
S4 standard would've done better more likely. Clover Trail demo'ed how viable two cores was for W8, let alone W8 RTwsw1982 - Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - link
There is already the comparison between the medfield, krait, swift and Exynos 5250 on the android platform, isn't there? I think microsoft is the one to blame that you can only compare clover trails and tegra 3 on windows platform, LOLKrysto - Monday, December 24, 2012 - link
Intel will not have anything that even approaches next year's ARM SoC's GPU's anytime soon. And they can't match Cortex A15 in performance anytime soon either.