Motorola RAZR i Will Indeed Pack a 2 GHz Single-Core Atom

From DailyTech: There was some speculation regarding whether Intel Corp.'s (INTC) new Z2460 processor would indeed achieve its maximum clock-speed of 2.0 GHz in retail product. For those out of the "Medfield" loop, the Z2460 is a part of Intel's ultra-mobile ("Medfield") Atom processor answer to the ARM Holdings plc. (LON:ARM) consortium.

AnandTech has offered confirmation that the Z2460 onboard Google Inc. (GOOG) subsidiary Motorola Mobility's RAZR i smartphone will indeed be clocked at 2 GHz. Of course, like any mobile CPU -- ARM or x86 -- the chip will spend much of its time floating around 1 GHz during lighter processing, only clocking up when digesting heavier loads like video or games.

Engadget has early benchmarks, which show the Intel system-on-a-chip (SoC) facing off with the dual-core 1.5 GHz Cortex A9 ARM processor -- Qualcomm, Inc.'s (QCOM) MSM8960 (a Snapdragon 4 chip)-- found in the RAZR M. Intel is focused heavily on the Sunspider benchmark -- a mobile JavaScript benchmark, and its faster single-core chip performed beautifully on this mark, finishing 50 percent faster than the Snapdragon 4 chip.

However, it trailed the multi-core ARM processor in synthetic benchmarks like CF-Bench and Quadrant. It also lost in synthetic game benchmark performance, posting approximately a quarter less frames per second in the popular GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen.

Despite the losses, these tests do demonstrate that the 2.0 GHz variant of the Z2460 is a formidable challenger capable of holdings its own with high-end ARM chips. With that said, there are some big question marks surrounding Intel's chip.
Intel Z2460

First, it features an XMM6260 baseband processor -- Intel's in-house baseband solution. The XMM6260 only supports HSPA+, which means that while the RAZR i may be a perfect fit for an all-HSPA+ network like Deutsche Telekom AG (ETR:DTE) subsidiary network T-Mobile USA, it will be unable to take advantage of the latest and greatest LTE connectivity on other U.S. networks like AT&T, Inc. (T).

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