Intel Clover Trail+, Advancing Atom For Smartphones and Tablets

Today, Intel is keeping on track for execution of their roadmap plan in the mobile space, with the release of their follow-on to Medfield, code-named Clover Trail+.  Clover Trail, as you’ll remember, is powering many a Windows 8 tablet these days.  Intel's latest Atom-based SoC is a more natural fit here, with the intrinsic advantages of being able to run full X86 compatible software on a tablet or convertible device, while still offering strong battery life performance.  That said, Clover Trail+, Intel’s new performance and feature-optimized version of Clover Trail for the smartphone and tablet market, has that same long row to hoe versus incumbents, at least in the highly competitive handset arena.

What’s more than interesting this time around is that Clover Trail+ seems to really have the chops (at least on paper) to keep pace with, and even exceed, certain performance characteristics of current, best-of-class ARM-based architectures that have been so dominant in smartphone designs thus far.  And on the power consumption front, Intel is claiming their long-beloved “HUGI” (Hurry-Up and Get Idle) approach to clock gating will afford them a platform power advantage like no other smartphone architecture on the market current.  A tall order.  Big claims.  Is Intel just getting warmed up?  

Let’s take a look.