Intel’s new chip for smartphones handily beats some of the fastest phones on the market, according to chip review site Anandtech.
Intel’s Atom Z2460 “Medfield” delivers “tablet-like scores” on the BrowserMark benchmark, wrote Anand Shimpi. “The Galaxy Nexus running ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) comes close, but once again Intel expects that on the same OS Medfield should be faster than any of the currently available SoCs (system-on-a-chip),” he said.
Intel announced the Medfield chip Tuesday at CES. The device-on-a-chip will be used in upcoming smartphones–and most likely other devices–from Lenovo and Motorola.
And it fared well on the SunSpider Javascript yardstick. “Although running what appears to be a stock Gingerbread browser, Intel’s Medfield reference platform posts SunSpider performance better than any other smartphone we’ve tested – including the Galaxy Nexus running Ice Cream Sandwich,” Shimpi wrote.
The chip should deliver similar numbers on Ice Cream Sandwich. “Intel promises that Medfield’s performance will scale on ICS as well – [so] the gap should be maintained.”
On the opposite hand, Shimpi cautioned that the performance hole would possibly decrease whilst new telephones emerge in accordance with the recent ARM Cortex A15 layout.
Note that every one benchmarks are initial because this is an Intel reference design telephone (which Intel is appearing off at the CES ground) no longer a commercially to be had phone.
So, what’s different this time around for Intel and smartphones? “Intel has been talking about getting into smartphones for a couple of years now, but thus far it hasn’t been able to secure a single design or partnership that resulted in a product actually coming to market,” Shimpi wrote.
Which, after all, is true. Intel announced a few years back that LG may convey out an Atom-based smartphone. by no means happened. Nor did Nokia in the end bring out a phone based on Intel’s Moblin Linux platform.
“This time around, things are different. The major change? Focus, and Google,” according to Shimpi. “Intel has ramped up the software engineering engine, going into the Android source code (Gingerbread, Honeycomb and now ICS) and fixing bugs. Intel’s goal is to deliver the most stable version of Android as a result of its efforts,” he wrote.