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Intel's Bay Trail benchmarked, makes first appearance in Toshiba 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablet

At IFA 2013 in Berlin, Toshiba has shown off the first tablet to be powered by Intel's upcoming Bay Trail SoC. Following some initial hands-on time at IFA, it doesn't look good for either Windows 8.1 or Bay Trail. In conflicting news, though, the first official quad-core Bay Trail benchmarks were also released by Intel yesterday -- and they show an Atom chip that is around three times faster than its predecessor, and about on par with AMD's Kabini, while drawing half as much power (on paper, anyway).
By Sebastian Anthony
An Avoton (Silvermont) wafer

At IFA 2013 in Berlin, Toshiba has shown off the first tablet to be powered by Intel's upcoming Bay Trail SoC. The 8-inch tablet, dubbed the Encore, gives us our first chance to demo Windows 8.1 on a near-final device, and also to see just how well the highly anticipated quad-core Bay Trail SoC performs. Following some initial hands-on time at IFA, it doesn't look good for either Windows 8.1 or Bay Trail. In conflicting news, though, the first official quad-core Bay Trail benchmarks were also released by Intel yesterday -- and they show an Atom chip with impressive performance that's around three times faster than its predecessor, and about on par with AMD's Kabini, while drawing half as much power (on paper, anyway).

The Toshiba Encore, a 1280x800 8-inch tablet running Windows 8.1, appears to be powered by a quad-core Atom Z3770 SoC clocked at 1.5GHz. This is the standard Bay Trail-T tablet part that will likely find a home in dozens of x86 Windows 8.1 tablets this fall. It has four Silvermont cores, no Hyper-Threading, and support for 64-bit dual-channel LPDDR3-1066 memory. Intel lists the part's SDP (scenario design power) at 2W, but leaked data suggests the TDP will be 7W when Turbo Boost (rumored to be 2.4GHz) kicks in. According to early Silvermont data released by Intel, each core is meant to be up to three times faster than the Saltwell cores found in last year's Medfield/Clover Trail SoCs, while consuming the same amount of power.

iPad Mini (left) vs. Toshiba Encore (right) <Image credit: The Verge>iPad Mini (left) vs. Toshiba Encore (right) In hands-on testing, the Encore leaves a lot to be desired. At eight inches, it clearly tries to compete with the iPad Mini -- but it's 3.5 millimeters thicker (10.7 mm vs. 7.2), and a full 167 grams heavier (479 grams vs. 312). As a result, while the Encore is still one-handable, it verges on being too chunky. We'll have to wait for a teardown to find out whether the Encore's extra volume is a side effect of Toshiba not having Apple's manufacturing expertise, or whether it's necessitated by Bay Trail's beefier cooling and battery requirements. Performance-wise, the Encore isn't great, with lots of stuttering and sporadic UI slowdowns. Toshiba says this is due to the Encore requiring further driver optimizations, but given the GPU is a fairly well-known entity (the HD 4000 GPU from Ivy Bridge), I am not completely convinced. It could also be down to issues in Windows 8.1, which Microsoft will be tweaking until the last moment(Opens in a new window). Intel Bay Trail Cinebench 11.5 benchmark

In other news, Intel engineer Francois Piednoel tweeted a screenshot of an Atom Z3770 clocking a score of 1.47 in Cinebench 11.5. This is a fantastic score that's three times that of the dual-core Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail), 50% faster than AMD's A6-1450 (Temash), comparable to AMD's A4-5000 (Kabini), and about 15% slower than a dual-core Sandy Bridge chip. The most important comparison is against quad-core Temash, AMD's tablet part that has a similar TDP to the Z3770, and Kabini, which has twice the TDP of the Atom part. In this light, Bay Trail looks very impressive indeed. What we don't know, however, is the actual TDP of the Bay Trail parts -- we know that Piednoel posted some very impressive performance figures, but we have no idea how much power was consumed during that test.

Intel's Silvermont core, versus some dual- and quad-core ARM competitorsIntel's Silvermont core, versus some dual- and quad-core ARM competitors. (These are Intel's internal figures; real benchmarks will vary wildly.)

From Intel, all we currently have to go on are some non-labeled graphs, like the one above. Whether the final Atom silicon actually hit its TDP target will be very interesting indeed, and probably the deciding factor when it comes to knocking the crown off ARM's head. We wouldn't be surprised if quad-core Bay Trail's TDP is actually surprisingly close to quad-core Kabini (15W). We will finally find out at the Intel Developer Forum next week -- and yes, ExtremeTech will be there.

Now read: AMD’s last, best hope: Low-power Kabini, Temash are ready for action; could rejuvenate mobile market

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