Intel Medfield Details Leak -- Powerful, But a Battery Guzzler

From DailyTech: Numbers have reportedly leaked via VR-Zone on the performance of CPU kingpin Intel Corp.'s (INTC) Medfield, the company's tardy upcoming ultra-mobile CPU. Now it's important to exercise a bit of caution as the credibility of these figures is questionable and even if they're the real deal, Medfield is still reportedly a half-year or more away from launch.

Noticeably absent from the leaked materials was any reference to a baked-in 4G LTE (or 3G GSM/CDMA) modem. Also absent was the very important CPU core count figure (based on the performance, this appears to be a dual-core chip).

The leak appears to consist of a benchmarked Red Ridge tablet. Red Ridge is the name of the Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet reference design, which Intel previewed in September. Given past information, it appears likely that Red Ridge does have a 3G modem onboard, though whether it's on-die remains to be seen.

So Medfield is a fast little bugger, capable of beating up on the current generation ARM smartphone chips. But the numbers are a bit deceptive as Medfield is more of a tablet chip (more on that in a bit), so it should have gone up against Tegra 3, but for some reason the testers instead put it up against Tegra 2. As they did not give the Samsung platform tested, it's very possible they pulled a similar shenanigan with Samsung's chip, testing the lower clocked smartphone variant, versus the higher clocked tablet variant.

Now the bad news: the power budget is quite high. The platform reportedly has a 2.6W TDP at idle and a maximum power consumption of 3.6W when playing 720P Flash video. By launch the maximum power is intended to drop to 2.6W, while the idle is also likely to drop a fair bit.

It's disappointing to see Intel is still trailing so badly in power. For example, a loaded Tegra 2 reportedly draws around 1 W, meaning that it could sip the aforementioned battery for around 6 hours before kicking the bucket. Intel's chip is fast, but it appears to be a "battery-guzzler".

More troubling is the fact that these results come from a 32 nm part, where as NVIDIA and Qualcomm have 40 nm parts (Samsung is also at the 32 nm node). In other words, that process advantage Intel is always talking about appears to be nonexistent here.

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