Intel Atom Medfield chip specs leaked

Intel is preparing to launch its first Atom chips aimed at smartphones and tablets. The new processors are based on the Medfield platform, and while Intel has been teasing the low-power system-on-a-chip platform for years, the company has been pretty quiet about hte actual specifications.

Now the folks at VR Zone have published some of the first specs and benchmark test results.

A reference tablet with a 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display and a Medfield chip reportedly has a 1.6 GHz x86 processor and 1GB of RAM. The tablet is currently running Android 3.x Honeycomb, but it’s designed to run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as well.

According to VR Zone, the tablet scored higher than an NVIDIA Tegra 2, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260 or Samsung Exynos processor in the Caffeinemark 3 benchmark.

The processor uses about 2.6W of power while idle, although the plan is to reduce that to 2W. It uses more power while watching video or performing other actions. That’s not bad for an x86 chip, but I haven’t seen any details yet about what this means for Medfield tablet battery life.

Posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011, 12:40 pm by Brad Linder | 3 Comments

James

2.6W idle and 3.6W playing a 720p Flash video seem nice (BTW, your reference link seems broken). What’s the power consumption of the mentioned ARM chips? Though I’m more interested in the performance of a Windows compatible version myself. Will there be one?
http://www.liliputing.com Brad Linder

Whoops. That link should work now.

As for the idle power for ARM chips… it’s a little harder to come by, but my understanding is that most ARM chips have idle power usage of less than 1W. Medfield gets closer than other Intel chips, but still uses more.

I’m more concerned about battery life in phones than tablets. You can always make up for a little extra power draw in a tablet by sticking a larger battery in it, but you don’t want to carry around a 1.5 pound phone just so you can get all-day battery life.
Nathan

Ya, I’m more interested if a Windows compatible version is coming out and what its performance and battery life are. Too bad, from what I’ve read, it won’t be till 2013 until there’ll be a new architecture change that would bring a noticeable increase in performance.

Intel Atom Medfield chip specs leaked

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