Benchmark tools are best taken with a grain of salt, but they provide at least one way to compare performance between devices. And Intel is using FutureMarks’ 3DMark test for Android to make the claim that its new chip for smartphones and tablets offers better graphics performance than one of the fastest ARM-based chips on the market.

moorefield benches

The Mobile Geeks team caught up with Intel at Computex this week and spotted a display with a few phones side-by-side. One is a Samsung Galaxy S5 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor and Adreno 330 graphics. Next to it is a phone with an Intel Atom Z3580 Moorefield processor and PowerVR G6430 graphics.

Since this is an Intel display, the results might not surprise you: The phone with the Moorefield chip scored nearly 21,000 while the Galaxy S5 topped out at 18,144.

To Intel’s credit, the display also includes a phone with a slower Intel Atom Z3480 Merrifield chip and PowerVR G6430 graphics which scored just over 16,400. That’s still a pretty respectable score though.

Benchmarks don’t always tell the whole story, since they don’t always reflect real-world performance. And a fast CPU and GPU aren’t the only things you need to perform well both in benchmarks and everyday tasks: devices also need a reasonable amount of memory and relatively fast storage… not to mention apps that are optimized for the chip’s architecture.

Still, these initial results look promising for Intel.

The first devices with Intel’s new with Merrifield and Moorefild chips should begin shipping in June.

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12 replies on “Intel says Moorefield tops Snapdragon 801 in graphics benchmarks”

  1. Anyone that tried real Windows apps on earlier Atoms with PowerVR graphics knows that benchmarks and real life are like comparing apples and nuts. (The type of nuts nuts that mate with bolts, not the nuts that think benchmarks are useful.) I don’t trust Intel to get it right until I actually try it myself. A company that enters the mobile market with the goal of giving away 40M mobile CPUs in 2014 and only managed to give away (yes – for all practical purposes the CPU is for free!) 5M CPUs in Q1 must be doing something wrong.

  2. End of the day haven’t seen any great graphics intensive mobile OS ARM powered products regardless of the benchmarks. Whereas there’s no doubt about how much awesome graphics intensive software runs on x86. Intel has no reason to even bother showing benchmarks since its still apples and oranges. Intel is moving brutally fast to own the mobile space in the same way that it owns the desktop space.

    1. I think that’s a bit optimistic of you to say that “Intel is moving brutally fast to own the mobile space”.
      If anything they are moving brutally slow. They’ve let various ARM makers dominate for many years.

      1. Otellini wasn’t focused on mobile for a long time; when he finally started turning to it, he lost the CEO position. But since Intel has actually started making the effort they’ve moved very quickly (look at how quickly Win RT was rendered obsolete for example), but it is definitely true they ignored the space for a long time. I think you’re right when you say “They’ve let various ARM makers dominate for many years.” but not quite in the way you may have meant it 😉

    2. They are not moving fast at all. They would like to, that is for sure. There is still a definite resistance towards their products among the OEMs, so only those will use Intel mobile products which don’t have their own ARM based solution (and no cheap access to it). That immediately rules out Samsung and Apple which dominate the market.

      Moreover, I have recently tried out a Bay-Trail based 2-in-1 tablet/laptop with Win8.1 and wasn’t impressed very much at the progress of Intel in this area. The speed was still only OK and the weight was intolerable (probably result of the big batteries needed for the 10hour runtime).

      So I took it back and bought a real laptop with a Core i5. When the need arises, I will probably buy (again) an Android tablet for light browsing. Even the Core i5 could have been avoided if Samsung had gotten its act together at ARM laptops and release a proper fullHD laptop with something of a quad-Cortex-A57 (instead of those limited ChromeOS laptops) and decent-sized SSD.

      1. I disagree with a lot of what you say. Pretty much the only OEMs that are using their own ARM products – like you say – are Apple and Samsung – and Samsung uses both Samsung as well as non-Samsung cpus. That Apple and Samsung account for a significant portion of the market is undeniable, but that may also be the only reason ARM cpus make up the dominant portion of the mobile product market. It’s more interesting to see what kind of progress Intel is making in the non-Apple-Samsung world.

        That said, I routinely prefer my Asus t100 over my Surface Pro w/ i5 because in my use cases the t100 does great. It destroys all the previous atom based products hands down and almost never makes me feel like I need more power. It’s a significantly improved product. And moorefield looks great too.

  3. And how does it compare to the 805? After all, the 805 is for the second half, isn’t it, and moorefield seems to be so too.

    Plus a few things to consider, shipping device versus reference design which might not be optimized for battery life might not be a fair comparison, the fact that they clocked the GPU to over twice what Apple did with the same GPU (remains to be seen how this will affect battery life). Finally there’s the question of how much the score is owed to the CPU and how much to the GPU.

    Now I’m not saying their new chip isn’t better, just that they don’t have the best track record but from what we can see they are finally competitive in the high end and not just the mid-range.

  4. Tegra k1 as advertised by Xiaomi was at almost 30k and in the other leaked benchmark some 25k.

    1. Xiaomi user are notorious for trying to cheat their benchmark. I wouldn’t believe any of these random benchmark screenshots that shows up unless it was submitted by Xiaomi

  5. Craptastic PowerVR. that’s all I need to know to steer clear of any of these intel chips.

    1. Imagination has over 80% of the IPs for the GPU used in mobile devices in the entire market… And the model used in these chips are the more up to date series that’s more comparable to the other top choices on ARM SoCs…

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