Qualcomm’s Quad Core Krait Is 425% Faster Than Intel’s Medfield

Intel has been pretty silent about smartphones during this year’s IDF event in San Francisco, California. Eventually, the company announced the 2 GHz version of the Medfield Atom and we reported all about that here.

The thing is that we’ve compared the new CPU with other mobile processors using ARM architecture that are already available on the market and some have been available for quite some time.

Qualcomm is now ready with its quad-core Krait APQ8064 mobile processor and the novelty about this one is not the custom ARM Cortex A15 implementation, but the impressive Adreno 320 integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU).

Hardware experts at Anandtech.com have managed to get third hands on the new LG Optimus G smartphone that uses the new processor and they’ve also run some benchmarks on the new chip.

We’re not going to make a graphics comparison as we already know how slow Medfield’s PowerVR SGX540 is and there’s no point in comparing it with Tegra 3, let alone Adreno 320.

We are going to focus on Intel’s specialty and the most important processing aspect on a modern computing device.

Floating point (FPU) performance is what we’re referring at and Intel’s FPUs are famous for their performance and efficiency.

Some might think that this also applies to the new Medfield SoC, but reality will prove them something completely different.

When testing in the well-known Linpack benchmark, Medfield manages a score of 92 points inside the Lava XOLO X900 phone, but this is the 1.6 GHz version of the CPU.

We’ve reported here that the 2 GHz version inside Motorola’s new phone manages a score of 108 points.

At first glance, we see that Qualcomm’s Krait is 5.25 times faster than the 1.6 GHz Medfield and that’s an amazing 425% performance difference between the two.

Comparing with the 2 GHz Atom, the APQ 8064 SoC is “just” 4.47 times faster.

FPU performance is essential in modern computing as internet Flash performance, gaming performance and many other areas are directly depending on it and this is one area where Intel’s Atom is years behind the ARM processors.