Results: Power And Efficiency
We're going to buck convention today and start with a look at power consumption over time. I can't help it; after slogging through several pages of unexciting benchmark results in Intel Core i7-4960X Review: Ivy Bridge-E, Benchmarked, only to discover that efficiency was ironically the most interesting characteristic of Intel's new flagship, I'm really curious as to how Bay Trail registers, even if it means spoiling some of the performance story.
The red line is Intel's 10 W Celeron J1750, and wow, check out that power consumption through our suite. We can tell by the length of the line that the new Celeron isn't the fastest option in our selection of processors. However, it does give us a taste of what's to come compared to Atom D2700 (with discrete graphics) and AMD's A4-4000.
Averaging power consumption across the entire run distills the line graph into something simpler. We get confirmation that the Celeron J1750 uses very little power. The entire platform, including storage and memory, averages less than 20 W. Zotac's Atom D2700-based platform is rated for the same 10 W, yet averages notably higher consumption. This is because it's complemented by a GeForce GT 520 discrete GPU, though. Can't blame this one on the host processor. And as a result, we can't generalize about Bay Trail's efficiency versus Cedarview.
The Ivy Bridge-based Celeron G1610 steps average draw up an additional 10 W and is followed up by the 32 nm A4-4000 almost 9 W higher than that.
What this figure fails to tell us is how efficiently each platform handles our benchmark suite. For that, we multiply the average power by the time it takes to finish the benchmarks, which are all the performance-sensitive, faster-is-better type.
Again, Intel is doing amazing things with 22 nm manufacturing and its latest architectures. Celeron J1750, based on Silvermont, is more efficient than even the Ivy Bridge-based Celeron G1610, which smoked through our benchmark suite, but used more power to do so.
The Atom D2700, dragged down on the power side by a GeForce GT 520 graphics chip that doesn't encounter much 3D work in the pared-back list of tests we're using, fares poorly. It still turns out .06 Wh more efficient than the A4-4000, however.
So, even before we break into the performance numbers, we have to be excited about Bay Trail's prospects in the tablet space, where we can be relatively sure that this is a faster, more efficient design than what came before. Remember also that we're looking at the Celeron J1750, the lowest-end desktop model. Intel has two other 10 W SKUs with four cores each that'll cut through threaded applications with more alacrity than the dual-core SoC on our test bench.
