It was only earlier on this week at MWC when Intel unveiled their new Clover Trail processors that featured a dual core hyper-threaded design to promised to bring performance that was on par with any of the quad-core designs featured by their competitors. We have been waiting for benchmarks to put these claims to the test and Android Authority were lucky enough to get a hands on the new Clover Trail chip powering the Lenovo K900.
Clover Trail chips are no slouch scoring an impressive 25138 in the Antutu benchmark, especially when you take into account that the Lenovo K900 features a full HD 1920×1080 display. As a comparison, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 in the HTC One scored 22756 , which was already significantly more than the competition such as Galaxy Note 2’s score of 17531. This makes the Clover Trail chipset the second fastest chipset on the market, behind Nvidia’s Tegra 4 which managed to score a record breaking score of 36305. Despite that, Intel’s latest outing isn’t something to be sniffed at, especially when this is still an early design that could be far from optimised, while Nvidia’s Tegra 4 benchmark was done on the Phoenix platform that is a highly optimized reference design made by Nvidia themselves, not by a third-party.
However, these scores are lower that the ones that were shown during CES, but the clock speeds have been lowered from the 2000 MHz at CES to a more pedestrian 1400 MHz, which coincide with the lower score. As for the reason of lowering the clock speeds it could be used to increase yields in production, because lower binned chips can still find themselves into phones, or as a way to preserve battery life and reduce heat generation, especially when compared to the energy efficiency that can be achieved from ARM based chips.
If we break down the scores further take note of how the Intel chipset almost scores 8200 for RAM, which is double of the Snapdragon 600’s score of 4015. The performance of the PowerVR SGX 544 GPU in Clover Trail also outscored the Snapdragon’s Adreno 320 by 1000 points. While it does lack performance when it comes to I/O and CPU performance, most of the performance that your perceive when you use your phone is handled by the GPU and RAM so the user interface of any smartphones running the latest Intel chipset should be slick and fast.