On Test The Track With Dell's Venue 8 7000 And Intel's Moorefield
Dell has been strategically setting-up their new Venue 8 7000 tablet for cameo appearances over the past few months, starting back at Intel Developer's Forum in September of last year, then again at Dell World in November, and of course at CES 2015. At each event we got some hands-on time with Dell's interesting new tablet and the Intel Moorefield Atom platform that powers it, along with Intel's RealSense camera setup, but until this week we haven't gotten much more than a few spare minutes kicking the tires. However, upon our return from CES in Las Vegas last week, Dell had a couple of packages waiting on our doorsteps, which included both the hot new 2015 Dell XPS 13 ultrabook and their new darling tablet as well.
We've been busy putting both devices through their paces this week and have some preliminary numbers with the Venue 8 7000 to share. What's interesting about this new device, in addition to Intel's RealSense camera is its Atom Z3580 quad-core processor, which is based on Intel's latest Moorefield architecture.
The Dell Venue 8 7000's IDF Appearance
Moorefield expands on Intel's Merrifield Atom feature set and offers two additional CPU cores with up to a 2.3GHz clock speed, an enhanced PowerVR 6430 GPU and support of faster LPDDR3-1600 memory. Moorefield is also built for Intel’s XMM 7260 LTE modem platform, which supports carrier aggregation.
First, let's give you a video walk-around the device, then we'll get into some preliminary performance numbers...
We've been busy putting both devices through their paces this week and have some preliminary numbers with the Venue 8 7000 to share. What's interesting about this new device, in addition to Intel's RealSense camera is its Atom Z3580 quad-core processor, which is based on Intel's latest Moorefield architecture.
The Dell Venue 8 7000's IDF Appearance
Moorefield expands on Intel's Merrifield Atom feature set and offers two additional CPU cores with up to a 2.3GHz clock speed, an enhanced PowerVR 6430 GPU and support of faster LPDDR3-1600 memory. Moorefield is also built for Intel’s XMM 7260 LTE modem platform, which supports carrier aggregation.
First, let's give you a video walk-around the device, then we'll get into some preliminary performance numbers...
As you can see, Dell's new $399 tablet isn't starving for bandwidth in general use, providing a smooth, responsive performance during our demo here. But what do some of the actual benchmark numbers look like? We thought you'd never ask. Okay, we thought you'd ask, actually...
The Dell Venue 8 7000 and Intel's Moorefield Atom Z3580 put up a strong showing, but can't catch NVIDIA's latest Tegra K1 SoC in the SHIELD Tablet, nor Apple's A8X in the iPad Air 2. Moorefield appears to offer performance somewhere in between Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 and the 805, but south of the latest SoCs from NVIDIA and Apple.
AnTuTu's v5.6 general compute and system benchmark shows Venue 8 7000 in the lead...
AnTuTu's graphics tests are fairly light-duty and paint the new Venue 8 7000 and Intel's Moorefield in a more favorable light. In addition we see stronger memory bandwidth for Moorefield over Tegra K1 but slightly less FPU performance and comparable integer performance. Overall, Moorefield is able to just edge-out TK1 in this test. Regardless, it appears Intel is closing the gap in terms of its Atom-based tablet solution performance.
The Dell Venue 8 7000 and Intel's Moorefield Atom Z3580 put up a strong showing, but can't catch NVIDIA's latest Tegra K1 SoC in the SHIELD Tablet, nor Apple's A8X in the iPad Air 2. Moorefield appears to offer performance somewhere in between Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 and the 805, but south of the latest SoCs from NVIDIA and Apple.
Let's look at some additional workloads, with some general compute mixed in as well, with AnTuTu.
AnTuTu's v5.6 general compute and system benchmark shows Venue 8 7000 in the lead...
AnTuTu's graphics tests are fairly light-duty and paint the new Venue 8 7000 and Intel's Moorefield in a more favorable light. In addition we see stronger memory bandwidth for Moorefield over Tegra K1 but slightly less FPU performance and comparable integer performance. Overall, Moorefield is able to just edge-out TK1 in this test. Regardless, it appears Intel is closing the gap in terms of its Atom-based tablet solution performance.
What's perhaps equally interesting and impressive about the new Dell Venue 8 7000 is its wafer-thin and light frame and beautiful 2560x1600 OLED display. At just 6 millimeters thin and .67 pounds, the Venue 8 7000 is one of the thinnest lightest 8-inch slates currently on the market.
Stay tuned for more as we dive into our full review with the Dell Venue 8 7000 in the weeks ahead.
Stay tuned for more as we dive into our full review with the Dell Venue 8 7000 in the weeks ahead.
