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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."
Not if you use the NDK, which most games and video applications will use for performance reasons.
You can of course compile for both.
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
I design chips and work for intel.
Clover Trail is significantly more power efficient than Medfield because it has a lot more power control stuff in it, so more of it is turned off most of the time. This is not a big secret as far as I know.
The rest of the phone consumes power too, particularly the screen. So YMMV.
News at 11.
I don't think there's any chipmaker (CPU, GPU or otherwise) who hasn't been caught doing it. Not that that makes it right, of course.
For the quick readers, note that this is about Clover Trail, not to be confused with the recently announced Bay Trail. Though it does cast doubts on Intel's claims about the latter's performance...
Intel has a VERY long history of questionable ;) benchmarks, all the way to tweaking processor designs to run benchmark code faster. Microsoft's "Get The Facts" propaganda is just a pale imitation of Intel's history.
If you write your code in C, you can port it relatively easy to iPhone, Android, WP8, and Blackberry (depending how much UI code you have). If you write it in Java, avoiding the NDK, you have to do two-four times as much work to port it.
Which would you rather do, use the NDK and recompile, or write once for each platform? "The right way" isn't always a single choice, it's usually a compromise.....
If Intel processors become popular in Android phones, Google will probably introduce a multiple-architecture executable format, much like iPhone does with FAT and MACH (currently around 70% of apps for the iPhone have two architectures, one for ARM7 and one for ARM7s).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
App stores make this less of an issue. If Apple wants to switch the iDevices to x86, they'll tell developers that they must have an x86 build posted by such-and-such date.
Apple DOES NOT do that for older apps. It will often place restrictions on app updates or new app submissions (like must include iPhone5 screen shots) but they don't ever force older apps to do any kind of update - nor should they.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some guy on the Anandtech forums analysed the AnTuTu code and found that it indeed had been tweeked to favor x86 processors:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2330027
The arm fanboys
We are not "ARM fanboys". We are "Intel-haters". There is a difference.