Intel Corp (INTC)

[wbmw]

Performance of A15 is really good compared to Atom. Anand found 40-65% better performance at similar clock frequencies, though he also showed sizable power dissipation.

When display was off, the new Chromebook dissipated 4.1W in idle and 9.3W under load. That's a 5.2W spread in a benchmark that wasn't even a worst case scenario. Even the N570 Atom, with TDP of 8.5W, only had a 3.6W spread in the same benchmark - althrough, Atom N570 had notoriously high idle power, so it's not clear whether Exynos 5 actually has higher total dissipation. It just has a larger spread between load and idle, and likely a TDP in the 6-8W range - definitely beyond anything we've seen from ARM SOCs so far.

It would have been more interesting to benchmark a Clover Trail tablet for power dissipation, given the much improved 1.7W TDP of the Z2670. It probably would have blown away the Exynos 5 in power/perf efficiency.

The graphics tests were borderline silly, given that the N570 used the Intel Gen3 graphics core, at 200MHz, no less (a dual pipeline architecture similar to an SGX 535). Clover Trail should be at least 4-5x faster.

Not that I fault Anand, since he's using an older Chromebook for like-OS comparison. But it does mislead the reader on A15 superiority over Atom, since the older Chromebook did use an Atom SOC from nearly 2 years ago, based on an Atom processor core that's about 5 years old, and a graphics core that's nearly 8 years old.

A lot has changed at Intel, and I look forward to actually seeing the more modern designs. Clover Trail has at least a much improved SOC design (brand new), a 32nm power-optimized processor core (1.5 years old), and a graphics core that is only 3 years old. Making progress.