Android Performance Results

Intel was up front with us about the status of Bay Trail for Android – it is not nearly as ready for production as it was for Windows.  I ran into stability issues and Intel claims that performance will be better once the Android release is ready in 1-2 months.  Still, I thought it was important to see where the Atom Z3770 stands in relation to some currently selling products in the Android ecosystem.

  • Intel Bay Trail (reference platform)
  • NVIDIA Tegra 4 (NVIDIA SHIELD)
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro (Nexus 7 2013)
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon S600 (Samsung Galaxy S4)

Of these systems Intel is sole x86-based option which adds some complications for the platform’s performance.  Also, while the Nexus 7 and Galaxy S4 are completely standard devices, the NVIDIA SHIELD is a pretty special case as it is an actively cooled device.

 

BrowserMark 2.0

First up is the browser-based benchmark that we ran in the stock browser on each device, not on Chrome.  The Atom Z3770 is able to outperform the Tegra 4 from NVIDIA as well as both Qualcomm parts in our testing.

 

SunSpider 0.9.1

SunSpider indicates that Bay Trail and the high powered Tegra 4 are running neck and neck while both Snapdragon SoCs are further behind.

 

Basemark X

This graphics benchmark has two components, one on screen and one off screen.  The on screen test uses the native resolution of the tablet / smartphone while the off screen result renders to a static resolution.  The most important data is the blue line then as it gives us a better apples to apples comparison.  Intel’s Atom Z3770 is faster than both the new Nexus 7 and the Galaxy S4 (NA) though the Tegra 4 takes the overall win.  Don’t put much thought into the green bars here as the Tegra 4 is rendering to a 1280×720 screen (961 Kpixels) while the Bay Trail system has a 2560×1440 panel (3,686 Kpixels).

 

3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited

The new Unlimited version of 3DMark for Android iOS was just released this week and attempts to bypass the vertical sync limitation by using off-screen rendering targets, much like the Basemark X test above.  The result is a win in the overall score for Intel’s Bay Trail thanks to a significant advantage on the physics score.  The graphics score is fairly close between NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 and the Atom Z3770 with the slight edge going to Tegra.

 

MobileXPRT

Our final test is new one for us and attempts to focus on performance and the user experience.  “MobileXPRT runs five performance scenarios (Apply Photo Effects, Create Photo Collages, Create Slideshow, Encrypt Personal Content, and Detect Faces to Organize Photos) and five user-experience scenarios (List Scroll, Grid Scroll, Gallery Scroll, Browser Scroll, and Zoom and Pinch).”

The Intel Atom Z3770 takes a sizeable performance lead besting the NVIDIA Tegra 4 by 12% or so.  The user experience result is pretty even across the board which indicates the frame rate of the lists, zooms and scrolls were very consistent.

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