Intel Bay Trail vs Clover Trail benchmarks
Intel shows us how much faster its Bay Trail SoC is compared to last year's Clover Trail
Intel is proud of its new Bay Trail SoC, which it says can be used to create high-power tablets and excellent, but low-cost desktops and laptops. The question is, how much faster is Bay Trail than last year’s Clover Trail?
At IDF 2013 we attended a benchmarking session to see how this year’s SoC stands up to last year’s. Intel controlled the entire session and wouldn’t tell us which model of Clover Trail or Bay Trail tablet processors it was using. It’s also important to point out that on the SunSpider test, the Bay Trail model was running on Windows 8.1, while the Clover Trail tablet was running Windows 8.
POWER USAGE
Both tablets were hooked up to a power meter, which monitored how much power the CPU and GPU were drawing. In a video playback test it was clear that both Bay Trail and Clover Trail were drawing around the same amount of power, which should equate to around the same battery life.
Running the SunSpider benchmark, both drew around the same power again; however, as Bay Trail was faster it used less power overall, as the CPU could return to a low-power state faster.
SUNSPIDER
In the SunSpider benchmark, the Clover Trail tablet completed the test in 700ms running Windows 8, while the Bay Trail completed the test in 356ms running Windows 8.1. That makes Bay Trail around twice as fast as Clover Trail.
Intel claimed that the best ARM device can currently complete SunSpider in 600ms, although we’ve found that this test is very browser dependent, so we look forward to running our own tests.
IMAGE EDITING AND VIDEO EDITING
Intel wanted to show how Bay Trail managed with some every-day tasks, such as video editing and image editing. We recorded the side-by-side comparisons so you can take a look yourself in the videos below.
First, in the image editing test, Intel shows how the Bay Trail SoC can cope with Google Picasa’s Pencil effect, delivering the completed image much faster than with Clover Trail.
Next, using Arcsoft software to render a 720p video using Intel Quic Sync, the Bay Trail tablet is so much faster that it can even start playing the video before the Clover Trail tablet has finished.
GAMES
We saw a variety of games running on Android and Windows and in all cases it was fair to say that the Bay Trail was far ahead of Clover Trail. Running at the same resolution, the Bay Trail tablet managed smooth frame rates, where as the Clover Trail tablet struggled.
CONCLUSION
Obviously, the benchmarks chosen were designed to show off how quick Bay Trail is, but even from this we can get a feel for how the SoC feels. It’s definitely a lot quicker than Clover Trail and could make for some extremely snappy Android tablets, let alone Windows ones. We’re looking forward to getting final models ourselves, so we can see how it compares in our own benchmarks.