Intel Core m Broadwell Benchmark Shows Better Graphics than AMD ~ The World is Mine

Sep 10, 2014

Intel Core m Broadwell Benchmark Shows Better Graphics than AMD

9/10/2014 07:11:00 PM

dannzfay

The Core m mobile central processing unit (arguably System-on-Chip, or SoC for short) is one of the most ambitious ventures that Intel has had in years. Now, the company has the benchmarks to prove it.

Although that's not exactly accurate, since it wasn't the company that ran the tests that we're about to look through. Instead, a third party got ahold of a tablet powered by it. Not that we're complaining. Independent benchmarks are always preferable to the ones that companies may or may not release. Less chance of them being biased after all. So what do the tests show, you might ask? Actually, they paint a pretty promising picture for everyone who had high hopes from the new processor.

The chip beat everything pitted against it; A 12.5-inch tablet powered by the Intel Core m central processing unit was compared against the results previously registered by equivalent devices based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 and even AMD's E-Series APUs (accelerated processing unit). We mostly expected the chip to be better than the Qualcomm one, since that was a specific point raised by Intel during its IFA 2014 keynote that we attended on September 5. However, the real surprise was that the processor came out better than the AMD APUs as well. APUs are famed for having better graphics than pretty much every other processor out there, but Intel's Core m apparently does better even there. In Cinebench R11.5, the GL bench to be precise, the processor managed 17 FPS with 2.48 pts CPU. A lot better than any Atom, Pentium, or AMD E-Series tests ever recorder. Fair enough. Cinebench R11.5 is CPU-intensive, and Intel clearly holds the leadership in that area.

Not much to say about the SunSpider benchmark. Core m scores 142.8 under Internet Explorer 12 in Windows 8.1. Good, but nothing we didn't see coming. That leaves the surprise: in 3DMark IceStorm Unlimited, Core m scores 50,985 points, twice what Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 can do, and more than even the actual GPUs in AMD E-Series APUs.

The specs of the Core m; Just in case you haven't seen them yet or would appreciate having your memory refreshed, the Core m offers the following: two Broadwell x86 64-bit cores, PCI Express 3.0 root complex, 4 MB L3 cache, dual-channel LPDDR3 support, and a graphics chip with 192 stream engines and 24 execution units. Everything runs at a TDP of just 4.5W; not quite as great as on ARM chips, Snapdragon 800 included, but close.