Intel's Medfield Phone Beats Galaxy Nexus in Benchmarks

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Medfield beats the Galaxy Nexus in Vellamo but loses out to Google's flagship phone in BrowserMark.

Intel's Medfield made a big splash and both CES in January and Mobile World Congress in February. Intel didn't talk a lot about Medfield at CES. The company did unveil the first Medfield phone, the Lenovo K800, but so far that device is only headed for a Chinese release sometime this quarter. Mobile World Congress, on the other hand, yielded an announcement regarding what is to be Europe's first Medfield-based Android phone. Dubbed the Orange Santa Clara, the phone will run on European wireless provider Orange's network and is scheduled to launch this coming summer.

We already know that the Santa Clara packs a 1.6Ghz Atom CPU, but for those of you that can't bring yourself to wait that long to see how the Santa Clara performs against today's phones, we've got some interesting data for you. German blog Casych has run some benchmarks on the Santa Clara and posted the results (available here auf Deutsch). What you're looking at are the results of Qualcomm's Vellamo benchmark app. Casych also ran BrowserMark, which tests phones ability to render HTML and Java.

According to Casych's posting, the Santa Clara beat the iPhone 4S in BrowserMark, posting a score of 89,180 (the iPhone 4S boasts a BrowserMark score of 87,801) and kicked butt in Vellamo. How much butt? Well, it came out on top of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Acer Iconia Tab, the Motorola Xoom, the Asus Transformer and Google's Galaxy Nexus, performing particularly well in rendering and Javascript. The only devices that beat the Santa Clara in this benchmark were the Asus Transformer Prime and the Xiaomi Mi-One Plus. The former is powered by Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 chip while the Mi-One Plus packs a dual-core 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon.

Of course, benchmarks aren't the be all and end all, but they do offer a good idea of how the device will stack up to the other devices currently on the market. For now, it looks like Intel's single core Atom has no trouble going toe-to-toe with some of the top Android devices available today. We'll know more when the phone ships this summer. 

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(via SlashGear)

Jane McEntegart
43 Comments Comment from the forums
  • A Bad Day
    Power consumption? I don't like phones that need to be hooked up to the wall constantly...
    Reply
  • panders4
    It's just as well. Galaxy Nexus is using pretty old graphics hardware, and that looks like the biggest difference.
    Reply
  • erunion
    A Bad DayPower consumption? I don't like phones that need to be hooked up to the wall constantly...
    Hoping for a flaw so you can ignore this known strength. Yawn.
    Reply
  • hunter315
    Looks like they did it by boosting its rendering capabilities and its javascript speed but they took a big hit in user experience so im not sure that makes it better, just better in that set of benchmarks. Its not about whether they win or lose, its how they pulled it off, and it looks like the screwed the user experience part to get better JS performance so they could win.
    Reply
  • amk-aka-Phantom
    Now all they need is to re-brand these CPUs. I know I sound silly, but wouldn't be proud of having an Atom CPU in my phone. They're associated with cheap quality, slow-ass CPUs for me... call it "Core i1" or something respectable.
    Reply
  • bystander
    erunionHoping for a flaw so you can ignore this known strength. Yawn.More like we are interested in an important piece of info. If it also has great batter life, then it's awesome. If it has average battery life, it's still very good, but if it is terrible, then people won't be happy.
    Reply
  • erunion
    bystanderMore like we are interested in an important piece of info. If it also has great batter life, then it's awesome. If it has average battery life, it's still very good, but if it is terrible, then people won't be happy.
    Yet anandtech did a write up on power months ago. So what do we call claims that an medfield phone will need to be plugged into a wall? I vote trolling.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones%29
    Reply
  • bystander
    erunionYet anandtech did a write up on power months ago. So what do we call claims that an medfield phone will need to be plugged into a wall? I vote trolling.http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365 tphones%29Thanks for the link, but no, you are expecting WAY too much. Very few people are likely to have read that article. This isn't even the same site as that review, how can you just expect everyone to have read it?

    You sounded more like the troll, but this link definitely helps put things in to perspective.
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    bystanderThanks for the link, but no, you are expecting WAY too much. Very few people are likely to have read that article. This isn't even the same site as that review, how can you just expect everyone to have read it?You sounded more like the troll, but this link definitely helps put things in to perspective.
    Well its Anandtech for one, one of the other big sites and according to that it will get close to the same battery life as a Galaxy S II which I don't find that hard to believe.

    There is also a tablet thats supposed to have 9+ hours of usage with a 30 day standby.

    Then we have the 22nm Atom to look forward to which will probably allow for more cores/higher clock speed whil reducing the power usage.

    Not sure why people have a hard time believing that Intel can do it when they have DT CPUs running at 17w.
    Reply
  • erunion
    bystander Very few people are likely to have read that article. This isn't even the same site as that review, how can you just expect everyone to have read it?
    I didn't. I ridiculed him for ignoring the article in favor of baseless speculation(and wishful thinking). I only brought up the power facts when you made a non-trolling response.
    Reply