Tuesday, 27 December 2011 09:56
Medfield performance leaked, looks impressive
Written by Peter Scott
Scares the beejeesus out of Qualcomm, Nvidia
Intel is slowly starting to hype up its new Medfield chip, a 32nm SoC that should find its way into next generation tablets and smartphones next year.
According to VR Zone, the new chip looks like a world beater and it is faster than current ARM chips with Nvidia and Qualcomm stickers on them. In fact, a 1.6GHz Medfield scores about 10,500 in Caffeinemark 3, ahead of the Tegra 2 and Snapdragon MSM8260, which score 7500 and 8000 respectively. However, it’s worth noting that Nvidia and Qualcomm already have faster chips on their hands, i.e. Tegra 3 and S4.
VR is reporting that other performance figures also look quite good and Medfield should be quite competitive. However, in terms of power consumption it still lags behind ARM players. The prototype consumes about 2.6W in idle and Intel hopes to hit 2W by the time Medfield is ready for production. In 720p Flash playback, Medfield consumes 3.6W, and the target is 2.6W.
So, on paper Intel’s first proper SoC looks pretty good, although power consumption could be, or rather has to be better. In case Intel fails to shave off a watt or two, it will probably have a hard time in the smartphone market, but Medfield looks like a decent enough processor for tablets.
More here.