Intel Wins Simulated Moorestown vs. iPad Battle

News
By Marcus Yam
published

Intel's Atom running Chrome in Windows XP beats the Apple iPad running Safari.

Earlier this week Intel launched a new generation of Atom system-on-chip processors that are aimed capturing a share of the mobile market. Current and previous Atom chips have done an amazing job at monopolizing netbook hardware, but now Intel wants to go after the devices such as cell phones and tablets – an area dominated by ARM.

Right now, the king of ARM processors for mobile devices appears to be Apple A4 chip, which is widely believed to be a Samsung Cortex A8 chip clocked up to 1GHz. Apple touts the iPad as being incredibly fast, and hands-on experience has shown that the device is incredible smooth with the iPhone OS. But a new simulated test shows that Intel is faster, even while running Windows XP.

UMPC Portal ran a browser test between an iPad and Viliv X70, which has its Menlow-based Atom platform running at 800MHz. While this isn't a test between Moorestown and the ARM-based A4, the practical architectures between Menlow and Moorestown should be quite similar.

In a webpage loading test, the 800MHz Atom Menlow running the latest Chrome on Windows XP matched the loading speeds of Safari on the iPad. When the Atom was cranked up to Menlow's 1.3GHz ceiling, the Windows XP tablet was able to load faster than the iPad – even with Flash enabled. The simulation leads us to believe that the Moorestown running at a 1.5GHz speed would be even faster.

Check out the video below for the test.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
42 Comments Comment from the forums
  • saaiello
    Thats awesome now intel just better not charge $600 for their mobile pad.
    Reply
  • husker
    Wait, let me show me show you my surprised face:
    Reply
  • digiex
    "nakaka" ViliV
    Translation, "its ViliV able"
    Reply
  • flip_x
    lets see it load webpages with internet explorer... apple used there browser.. they should use windows xp browser..
    Reply
  • nun
    idk this looks more like a comparison of browsers
    Reply
  • pbalstar
    lol... I like how they including the sucker punch "the Windows XP tablet was able to load faster than the iPad – even with Flash enabled."
    Reply
  • Trueno07
    But no one uses the "windows Xp broswer"

    No one.
    Reply
  • Derbixrace
    flip_xlets see it load webpages with internet explorer... apple used there browser.. they should use windows xp browser..
    why with microsofts browser? i dont think intel has much to do with internets browser :) explorer isnt intels if you didnt know :D
    Reply
  • zelannii
    1) was the Internet cache on XP cleared, or had that machine already loaded the site? This could disadvantage a mobile platform that does not cache websites like mobile Safari, and invalidates the test.
    2) Were both machines using the same wireless conenction technology, or was one on WiFi vs 3G or different provider's 3G systems?
    3) Why not run Safari on XP vs Safari on iPad, as a more accurate comparison? Or, since both run opera mini, that could have been tested, or load Linux on the alternate platform to put OS differences more on Par (or hackintosh the tablet).
    4) video playback FPS limits were not tested? Brute force CPU means nothing without graphics to support it. Synthetics are one thing, full system processor/GPU comparrison is another.
    5) 3D Graphic capability was not tested either?
    6) power draw was not tested (watts per hour during equal loads)? Great, if it's 10% faster, but 50% more juice and 40% more heat means nothing to me...
    7) did both platforms use flash based disk systems, or was the Archos running off SSD, higher performance RAM, or some other hardware that might favor load time of a web site. This was to compare processor to processor, not tablet to tablet, right? All things were NOT as equal as could be so this test has very little real world relevancy...

    *I'm not pointing out which platform I think is better or worse, simply that I can not take this data into account either way, and to point out the test methodology flaws.
    Reply
  • climber
    Is it just me or does anyone else notice that the displays are different sizes and thus more than likely different resolutions and the higher the resolution, the slower the display of information as a whole compared to a lower resolution setup. So I would rather see a clock for clock, exact resolution comparison. I am not an apple fanboy, I'll never buy a mac desktop or laptop, netbook maybe, tablet, unlikely. Just my observation.
    Reply