Last month a number of vendors showed off their first Bay Trail-T tablets at IDF 2014 and Intel went to great lengths to talk up the new chip. Bay Trail marks a significant change in Intel’s mobile strategy and even before it was introduce it was obvious that it would be a game-changer.

A number of early benchmarks indicated that Bay Trail would indeed be a very competitive product and now we have a few more interesting numbers, courtesy of Engadget. The device tested by Engadget was a Bay Trail reference tablet with a quad-core Z3370 part, running Android rather than Windows 8.1.

In Quadrant 2.0 it scored 21,176, outpacing the Tegra 4 and Snapdragon 800 with 16,436 and 20,762 respectively. In Antutu the Tegra 4 came out on top, but all three chips were very close, so it’s a practical tie. In Sunspider 0.9.1 Tegra 4 led the way with 499ms, trailed by Qualcomm with 543ms and Intel with 560ms. Bay Trail’s worst showing was in CF-Bench. It scored 27,791, while Qualcomm and Nvidia bagged 36,744 and 41,325 respectively.

So, the Bay Trail reference tablet can keep up with Tegra 4 and Snapdragon 800 in most tests, but that’s not all. Unlike ARM parts, it can also run Windows 8.1, which opens up a range of possibilities in the tablet/hybrid market.

Intel is getting there, Bay Trail is very close indeed, although it is still a bit pricier than ARM chips, but one has to wonder what Airmont parts will be capable of in the not so distant future.