Betting On Bay Trail: Intel's Atom Overhaul Tested

All of our Windows tests were run using Windows 8 32-bit. There's still no Connected Standby support for Windows 8 64-bit and it's not clear why. One thing to note is that Bay Trail's overall performance is significantly higher in Windows 8, due to better driver support. These benchmarks need less introduction as they're tests we've run for years, but we'll call out the more interesting performance figures. AMD's Kaveri makes an appearance here as well.

Cinebench 11.5:

Cinebench 11.5 gives us our first look at comparative computational performance between Kaveri and Bay Trail. Single-threaded performance is particularly interesting here. Remember, in single-threaded mode, the A4-5000 tops out at 1.5GHz while Bay Trail surges up to 2.4GHz.


This suggests that Kaveri retains a clock-per-clock efficiency advantage over BT, even though their raw performance figures are identical. We don't know what clock speed the Z3770 maintains during multi-threaded rendering, but Bay Trail's speed-up factor of 3.68 is slightly lower than Kaveri's 3.82. The implication here is that BT backs off its Turbo Mode clock modestly, but doesn't drop all the way back to its 1.47GHz base clock. Kaveri, meanwhile, runs close to 1.5GHz in both cases.

Both cores are far faster than the original Atom Z2760 and even the Core i7-2377M, single threaded.

Lame MT:

In our LAME MT MP3 encoder tests, the Z3770 is faster than Kabini in single-threaded benchmarks while slightly slower in multi-threading tests. Again, this suggests that the SoC is aggressively power gated, and hits peak Turbo Mode speed only when running 1-2 threads. Again, the speed-up compared to Z2760 is enormous. The Core i3-2377M is still faster in both metrics, but the gap has narrowed from "painful" to "tolerable," particularly if the system in question had other desirable features.

PCMark 7:

In total system benchmark PCMark 7, the Z3770 outperforms the A4-5000 overall, despite losing the Creativity, Productivity, and Entertainment sub-tests by significant margins. That's... odd. But again, the jump over plain old Atom is enormous, and well received.

SunSpider 0.9.1:

Here's a test where the Windows 8 / Android benchmark figures are substantially different. The exact same Z3770 that scored 578ms in Android 4.2.2 performs the test in 331ms using Windows 8, or just 57% the time. Whether this speaks to lingering issues with Intel's Android support or performance improvements from Microsoft is unclear. The new Bay Trail completes the test in 79% the time it takes AMD's Kabini, but is still significantly back from the Core i3. The original Z2760 brings up the rear, crying into its jar of paste.

3DMark: Ice Storm:

Finally, there's 3DMark: Ice Storm for Windows.


The "Basic" test wouldn't run on Android and the Unlimited Test isn't available on Windows, so we were left to compare against the two Extreme flavors, and vs the W8 Clover Trail tablet. The Android vs. Windows scores were essentially identical, implying the graphics core is well-utilized across both operating systems.  Again, Bay Trail shows a monumental improvement over Intel's previous generation Clover Trail+ Atom architecture.