Intel Medfield SoC Specs Leak

MrSeb writes "Specifications and benchmarks of Intel's 32nm Medfield platform — Chipzilla's latest iteration of Atom and first real system-on-a-chip oriented for smartphones and tablets — have leaked. The tablet reference platform is reported to be a 1.6GHz x86 CPU coupled with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM radios, and an as-yet-unknown GPU. The smartphone version will probably be clocked a bit slower, but otherwise the same. Benchmark-wise, Medfield seems to beat the ARM competition from Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia — and, perhaps most importantly, it's also in line with ARM power consumption, with an idle TDP of around 2 watts and load around 3W."

Comments

Re:One benchmark

[icebike]

It beats the current crop of dual core ARM processors (Exynos, snapdragon s3 and Tegra 2) in one benchmark that "leaked".

Nothing fishy about that at all.

Quote Vrzone:

Intel Medfield 1.6GHz currently scores around 10,500 in Caffeinemark 3. For comparison, NVIDIA Tegra 2 scores around 7500, while Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260 scores 8000. Samsung Exynos is the current king of the crop, scoring 8500. True - we're waiting for the first Tegra 3 results to come through.

But the same paragraph says

Benchmark data is useless in the absence of real-world, hands-on testing,

If the performance figures are realistic this is one fast processor, and it appears to be a single core chip, (or at least I saw nothing to the contrary). That's impressive.

Single cores can get busy handling games or complex screen movements, leading to a laggy UI. If they put a good strong GPU on this thing you might never see any lag.

It's not Intel's high cost process

[Sycraft-fu]

These days 32nm is their main process. They use 45nm still but not for a ton of stuff. Almost all their chips have moved to it. Heck they have 22nm online now and chips will be coming out rather soon for it (full retail availability in April).

Once of Intel's advantages is that they invest massive R&D in fabrication and thus are usually a node ahead of everyone else. They don't outsource fabbing the chips and they pour billions in to keeping on top of new fabrication tech.

So while 32nm is new to many places (or in some cases 28nm, places like TSMC skipped the 32nm node and instead did the 28nm half node) Intel has been doing 32nm for almost 2 years now (first commercial chips were out in January 2010).

Re:One benchmark

[teh31337one]

Yeah... no.

vr-zone

As it stands right now, the prototype version is consuming 2.6W in idle with the target being 2W, while the worst case scenarios are video playback: watching the video at 720p in Adobe Flash format will consume 3.6W, while the target for shipping parts should be 1W less (2.6W)

extremeTech

The final chips, which ship early next year, aim to cut this down to 2W and 2.6W respectively. This is in-line with the latest ARM chips, though again, we’ll need to get our hands on some production silicon to see how Medfield really performs.

Re:whoosh

[Svartalf]

Recent track record... Yeah, sure...

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Larrabee-canceled-Intel-concedes-discrete-graphics-NVIDIA-AMDfor-now

There's a few others like this one. This includes the GMA stuff where they claimed the Xy000 series of GMA's were capable of playing games, etc. They're better than their last passes at IGPs, but compared to AMD's lineup in that same space, they're below sub-par. Chipzilla rolls out stuff like this all the time. Been doing it for years now.

Larrabee.
Sandy Bridge (at it's beginnings...).
GMA X-series.
Pentium 4's NetBurst.
iAPX 432.

There's a past track record that implies your faith in this is a bit misplaced at this time.