Intel Clover Trail Atom Z2760 Tablet Performance Preview
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1080p AVCHD Video Playback CPU Utilization - Intel Atom Z2760
Here we can see that Clover Trail is barely breaking a sweat, playing back HD video with only about 25% CPU utilization. Next we chose to fire up a 1080p HD Youtube video streamed over our WiFi network.
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1080p Youtube Video Playback CPU Utilization - Clover Trail Atom Z2760
In this test configuration we're looking at CPU utilization on the Atom Z2760 SoC as it not only decodes 1080p HD Flash video from Youtube but also as the 802.11n WiFi network adapter in the tablet is being exercised as well. Here we see a bit more workload on the system with about 50% of the CPU resources consumed. Under this condition the Samsung ATIV was still able to easily switch back and forth between the Windows 8 desktop and the Metro start screen, as well as open other applications like weather and Bing news, without skipping a beat. As an aside, the ASUS Vivo Tab RT with its Tegra 3 chip at the helm, clocked in at 1.2GHz with the same video stream and showed ~ 60% CPU utilization.
We're just getting warmed up with testing Intel's new Clover Trail Atom Z2760 SoC, Windows 8 and the new Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T tablet. Over the next few days we'll be delving into our full review and showcase of the Samsung product and will look further into other performance characteristics of Intel's new tablet platform. For now, Clover Trail is impressive enough, in terms of general use performance, easily on par with what we've seen from Window RT devices driven by NVIDIA's Tegra 3 SoC. And that performance comes with the obvious added benefit of full X86 compatibility as well.Under certain test conditions, Clover Trail looks powerful but we need to spend a bit more time looking at graphics performance. The chip's on-board PoweVR SGX 545 GPU offers an interesting data point versus integrated graphics cores in both ARM-based architectures, as well as ultra low power integrated CPU/APU architectures. Where Clover Trail continues to feel a little pokey is with respect to memory bandwidth, though in practice and during regular use, the Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T was snappy, responsive and capable of anything you'd throw at it for a tablet usage model. Stay tuned as we hope to offer more insight into Clover Trail performance and take a look at battery life, in our full review, very soon.
