Bay Trail On The Desktop: Celeron J1750 Gets Benchmarked

Bay Trail's Performance On The Desktop: Benchmarking Celeron J1750

Again, Intel is most intently focused on the six tablet-oriented implementations of Bay Trail, and we share the company’s enthusiasm for portable devices with all-around better performance, longer battery life, and more advanced I/O capabilities. But because design wins are still forthcoming, there aren’t any tablets to test yet.

We did manage to get our hands on a Celeron J1750-based platform, though. Back on the first page, we mentioned that Bay Trail-based SoCs will also drive notebooks and desktops, albeit at different power targets. Intel is planning quad-core Pentium-branded processors with HD Graphics for both segments, along with quad- and dual-core Celeron SoCs with HD Graphics. For notebooks, expect N3000-series Pentiums and N2000-series Celerons. The desktop will initially see a Pentium J2850, a Celeron J1850, and a Celeron J1750. The latter model is a dual-core (single-module) chip; the other two are quad-core SKUs.

The Celeron-based mini-ITX platform in our possession gets away with passive cooling, since the dual-core Celeron only dissipates 10 W. The Silvermont cores run at 2.4 GHz, dropping as low as 500 MHz when the system is idle. Two SO-DIMM slots take 1.35 V DDR3L-1333 memory. Though storage connectivity is limited to SATA 3Gb/s, don’t think that your SSD is going to be bottlenecking this low-power SoC. Instead, we’re just happy that USB 3.0 is supported natively. Four lanes of second-gen PCI Express are also available.

Curious as to how Bay Trail-D fares against some of the most entry-level platforms, we rounded up Zotac’s D2700-ITX  WiFi Supreme (sporting a 10 W Atom D2700 and GeForce GT 520 graphics), AMD’s 65 W A4-4000 based on the Richland architecture, and a 55 W Celeron G1610 based on Ivy Bridge. Naturally, the A4 and 55 W Celeron are in a completely different class. But they also represent two of the least-expensive drop-in upgrades you can buy, both under $50. Some of our charts also include Samsung's ATIV Smart PC 500T with Atom Z2760 as a point of reference.

If anything, we’re most interested to see how Celeron J1750 stacks up to Atom D2700 at 2.13 GHz. Sporting a technically inferior graphics engine, lower core clock rate, lower peak graphics frequency, and notably less memory bandwidth, it shouldn’t even be a contest. But the Cedarview-based processor, built using Saltwell cores, does enjoy the benefit of Hyper-Threading.