Intel’s Medfield SoC Benchmarked, Almost Ready for Prime Time

Intel’s first real system-on-a-chip for mobile devices, its Medfield processor, has been making the rounds lately as it inches closer and closer to a final release. The CPU was shown off to MIT’s Technology Review earlier in the month as the focal point of a reference tablet as well as a reference smartphone, and now details are emerging on how the CPU stacks up in benchmark tests. A 1.6GHz model was tested in a tablet design utilizing 1GB of RAM and its score of 10,500 stacked up nicely against the 7,500 of NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and the 8,000 of the Snapdragon MSM8260. It is worth noting that the clock speed on the Medfield SoC was slightly higher than the models it was tested against, but the results are promising nonetheless.
In terms of power consumption things weren’t looking as great, but Intel is working to reduce battery drain and match or best its competitors. At idle the Medfield chip pulled 2.6W and 3.6W during heavy use. The chip maker hopes to bring idle power consumption down to 2.0W and have HD video playback top out at a 2.6W draw.