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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Homeles - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
I'd wake you up right now, but I'm not sure I'd want to risk you spreading your ignorance to others.zeo - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Medfield and Clover Trail+ ATOM are already being used in phones and tablets... the direct upgrade is called Merrifield and will be launched early next year but aside from being coupled with a LTE modem it's still based on the same Silvermont Architecture as this Bay Trail model!While Bay Trail is even more energy efficient than the previous Clover Trail ATOM! The Z3770 is providing roughly twice the performance but using no more power than the previous Z2760 Clover Trail, which was a 3W TDP rated SoC...
So battery life would only be worse if they coupled it with energy hogging parts like a 2560x1600 resolution screen for example... The back lighting alone would increase power consumption by up to 30%...
Asus had issues getting good enough battery life for their Tegra 4 updated Infinity Transformer model as well because they used that high resolution screen, for example...
Homeles - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
This is truly incredible. I did not think that Silvermont would outperform Kabini, especially given that Kabini has a much, much higher TDP.It's amazing -- AMD's Jaguar cores have been utterly invalidated. Kabini still has quite the graphics advantage, but at with a power draw several times higher than Bay Trail. This lead will only be exacerbated when Intel's 14nm Airmont drops in next year.
This is truly unbelievable. The question of who will win the ARM war has been answered.
It took 5 years of pain, but it seems like the wait was worth it.
Da W - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
I prefer a Kabini tab all the way. Where did you see such outrageous outperformance? CPU cores are better on some tests, graphics get pounded by AMD it's not even funny.Kabini would give me all the CPU power i need from a tablet, and i prefer more GPU power. Don't really care about power draw, i own a surface pro, anything would be an improvement.
Homeles - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Fortunately for Intel, and my argument, OEMs DO care about power.Also, just as an FYI, the A4 Kabini chip here is a 15W part. You won't see that in Tablets (or are at least very unlikely to).
icetorch - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
What I'd like to know is if they will compete in the same price range.zeo - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Bay Trail cost Intel less to make than the previous ATOM, thanks in part to the move to the 22nm FAB... which is much better developed now than when Intel introduced it with Ivy Bridge. So they're pushing for even lower pricing, which at best you might find Temash competing with but not Kabini...Mind, 15W TDP means the need for active cooling and that means larger designs, more materials, etc. that tend to raise costs versus fan-less designs that the Bay Trail T models will go into...
There are already two design wins for 8" tablets that look like they'll be barely priced over $300 and run full Windows 8.1... And they can go cheaper if they release it with Android instead... Never mind the lower end version of Bay Trail... the Z3770 is a quad core but they can go down to dual and even single core models...
ancientarcher - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
"Bay Trail cost Intel less to make than the previous ATOM, thanks in part to the move to the 22nm FAB... "Dream on... the previous Atom was 32nm and BayTrail is 22nm trigate. In which universe is BayTrail going to be cheaper?? Maybe if the area of the BayTrail were 1/3rd that of the 32nm Atom, which was, what around 120mm^2. Using trigate and double patterning is not cheap!
Secondly, people have mentioned that power consumption should be better than Snapdragon 800. Really!! Snapdragon 800 is in phones which means it's power consumption is lower than a tablet-only chip like the Baytrail. Had Baytrail been that super duper good on power consumption, rest assured, they would have put it in a smartphone...
Maybe if we had used some non-javascript based benchmarks (the new geekbench 3.0 anyone) we would have seen where the Baytrail chip is in relation to the best in the ARM camp with regards the CPU. As it is, we know that Baytrail is soundly beaten in the GPU department and the general Anandtech fluff on CPU benchmarks makes it difficult to say who is where on the CPU front... Maybe the scammed AnTuTu benchmark would also have helped Intel. Wonder why Anand didn't put it in...
JPForums - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
They are going to put it into a smartphone with Merrifield. As I understand it, the reason Bay Trail is targeted at tablets while Merrifield is targeted as phones is mostly the integration of a modem into Merrifield. Phone makers tend to shy away from multi-chip solutions if they have other options given the space premium in phones. I'm sure lower clocked parts and/or dual core offerings will available (just like its ARM counterparts), but the architecture is still the same 22nm Silvermont found in Bay Trail.
zeo - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
No dream, just reality! Intel's 22nm FAB is on its second gen, they got costs down and the ATOM is a far smaller and cheaper chip to produce than Intel's Core series. So yes, costs are down... really, look at the pricing of the devices being announced at IDF! They're all much cheaper than the when Clover Trail based devices first came out!And Silvermont is going into phones, it'll replace the present Medfield and Clover Trail+ early next year when they release Merrifield!