Intel’s Clover Trail tested: It beats most ARM-based chips… most of the timehttp://liliputing.com/2012/12/intels-clover-trail-tested-it-beats-most-arm-ba...Part of the fun of what is going on is the give and take between ARM and Intel -- Intel is intending to compete, not conform to any ARM standard.
In doing this, Intel is saddling itself with Microsoft instead of going with Android (as of right now, anyway). By doing so they give up advantage to ARM/Android/Linux as this code is much lighter and quicker to execute.
Bay Trail is next year's contender against the quad core A-15 ARM chipsets.
This year it is Clover trail and it isn't doing badly against dual and quad core A-9s that it is being compared against.
Running MS legacy apps under Windows8 full edition, Clover trail is a winner (duh). Clover trail won't run Win8 RT apps, so the comparison is skewed a bit since Win8 RT is required on the ARM chipsets and the Microsoft RT code is brand new and sorta kludgy right now.
But in raw processor power (video rendering, databases) Clover trail is the winner. The fact nobody is going to do this sort of work on a tablet begs the question, a win is a win after all.
ARM racks up other wins in the tablet type stuff:
"On the other hand, while tablets like the Acer Iconia Tab W510 offer decent graphics performance with support for HD video playback and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, modern ARM-based chips generally run circles around Intel’s system-on-a-chip when it comes to graphics performance.
The iPad 2 offers faster graphics, not to mention the 3rd and 4th generation iPads. NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chip (you know, the one that’s in the $199 Google Nexus 7 tablet) is noticeably faster."If you read the article, note the prices on Clover trail tablets are quite high ($550-$600) vs the $199 Nexus 7 that kicks its butt and listen carefully to the note that anything the Clover trail beat the ARM tablets on was full notebook type work
and you can buy a MUCH faster notebook for $350 for the video rendering and big database type things that will do that job much faster than any tablet.
And for tablet work, ARM still rules.
Late next fall when Intel's Bay trail comes out, and ARM's quad core A-57 comes out, then there will be another match up to see who rules.
In between these times, the Intel Clover trail will be matched up against the newly released quad core A-15 and quad core A-7 chipsets and losing more ground to them (until Intel gets Bay trail out into some products anyway).
Then there will be give and take leadership wise and Intel will get better and so will ARM. Intel always does better with a competitor to keep them honest.
So now it is Intel vs all the ARMS
and AMD -- so, Intel should get better even faster.