Intel's "Medfield" chip performance leaked

On December 26, VR-Zone published an article about Intel's newly formed "Mobile and Communications" division and the Medfield SoC. Formed from the merger of four separate divisions (Mobile Communications, Mobile Wireless, Netbook & Tablet PC and Ultra-Mobility), the new division will be producing a 32nm chip called Medfield, Intel's first complete SoC solution. In contrast to some of their older platforms (such as two-chip solutions that actually needed 4-5 chips to work), Medfield is Intel's first true, highly-integrated solution.

The only existing SoC to be manufactured using a 32nm process is Samsung's Exynos. Other solutions that Medfield will compete with include NVidia Tegra, Apple's A-Series, Qualcomm Snapdragon and Texas Instruments OMAP, among others.

VR-Zone have reported on the expected performance of "Medfield Tablet Platform". The product under test has a 1.6GHz x86 core, 1GB LP-DDR2, WLAN/Bluetooth/FM Radio (unnamed manufacturer), 10.1 inch 1280x800 screen and removable storage provided by an eMMC/micro-SD card. While the finished product will use the Android 4.x (Ice Cream Sandwich) operating system, benchmarks were performed using Android 3.x (Honeycomb).

Tested using Caffeinemark 3 benchmark, Medfield 1.6GHz scored around 10,500. The highest scoring existing product is Samsung Exynos, with a score of 8,500 (Tegra 3 results are not yet known, although they may compete at the high-end). Other notable scores are Tegra 2, with a score of 7500 and Qualcomm Snapdragon, scoring 8000. So, compared to existing products with known Caffeinemark 3 scores, Medfield is expected to show a performance boost of 24% or more.

The prototype under test used 2.6W when idle and 3.6W loaded (viewing a 720p Adobe Flash video). The target power consumption is 2W idle and 2.6W loaded. These are impressive figures, especially for anyone wanting a tablet device that can run x86 code with ultra-low power consumption.

According to the VR-Zone article, Medfield is expected to be launched in a few weeks.