New Analysis Casts Doubt On Intel's Smartphone Performance vs. ARM Devices

MojoKid writes "A few weeks ago, the analyst company ABI Research published a report claiming that Intel's new CloverTrail+ platform (dual-core Medfield) for smartphones was significantly faster and more power efficient than anything ARM's various partners were shipping. If you follow the smartphone market, that was a very surprising claim. Medfield was a decent midrange platform when it launched in 2012, but Intel made it clear that its goal for Medfield was to compete with other platforms in its division — not seize the performance crown outright. Further investigation by other analysts has blown serious holes in the ABI Research report. Not only does it focus on a single, highly questionable benchmark (AnTuTu), the x86 version of that benchmark is running different code than the ARM flavors. Furthermore, the recently released Version 3.3 of the test is much faster on Intel hardware than on any of the other platforms. But even with those caveats in place, the ABI Research report is bad science. Single-source performance comparisons almost inevitably are."

Comments

Re:Queue

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why would you have to queue them? I'm sure each of them has his own device, it's not like they have to contend for them with each other.

Re:Biased benchmarks endemic in chip industry

[Guppy]

I anxiously await Intel's new "Oregon Trail" CPU.

Might be a long wait, I heard a bunch of their engineers mysteriously died of dysentery while working on the design.