Intel has published a number of benchmarks that shed a positive light on its new Merrifield platform.
The successor to Clovertrail+ combines two high-speed cores with what the company calls the world's smallest LTE solution.
Three of the benchmarks are carried out on the XPRT 2013 suite and Intel makes it clear that it is a sponsor, member and major developer of the BenchmarkXPRT development community.
On WebXPRT 2013, which evaluates performance on a series of web applications, the reference design smartphone came out slightly ahead of the A7 and more than twice as fast as the Qualcomm Snapdragon found in the Galaxy S4 LTE-A.
Moving beyond
Intel's Z3480 surpassed the same system on chip, albeit by a smaller margin on the next benchmark application, the MobileXPRT 2013, which performs light media editing but is only available on Android.
As for battery life, BatteryXPRT, the third benchmark app, puts Merrifield atop others with a claimed battery life of more than 19 hours, ahead of both Qualcomm and Apple while using a lower capacity battery.
The last benchmark mentioned was GFXBench 2.7 where Intel's chip was competitive on 3D gaming, coming slightly behind Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800.
Another SKU in the pipeline?
The most exciting feature though is the promise of 64-bit Android, one which is likely to bring up to a third extra performance when deployed, although it is very much application dependent.
Oddly enough, the Intel reference phone used an unannounced Z3770 processor which has two cores clocked at 2.13GHz and a whopping 2MB L2 cache as well as a 4-inch HD display.
It is surprising though that Intel didn't put the quad-core version of Merrifield (Moorefield) to the test.
Earlier today, Intel also announced a new LTE chip at MWC, the XMM 7260, which supports download speeds of up to 300Mbps.
