Intel's Atom running Chrome in Windows XP beats the Apple iPad running Safari.
Earlier this week Intel launched a new generation of Atom system-on-chip processors that are aimed capturing a share of the mobile market. Current and previous Atom chips have done an amazing job at monopolizing netbook hardware, but now Intel wants to go after the devices such as cell phones and tablets – an area dominated by ARM.
Right now, the king of ARM processors for mobile devices appears to be Apple A4 chip, which is widely believed to be a Samsung Cortex A8 chip clocked up to 1GHz. Apple touts the iPad as being incredibly fast, and hands-on experience has shown that the device is incredible smooth with the iPhone OS. But a new simulated test shows that Intel is faster, even while running Windows XP.
UMPC Portal ran a browser test between an iPad and Viliv X70, which has its Menlow-based Atom platform running at 800MHz. While this isn't a test between Moorestown and the ARM-based A4, the practical architectures between Menlow and Moorestown should be quite similar.
In a webpage loading test, the 800MHz Atom Menlow running the latest Chrome on Windows XP matched the loading speeds of Safari on the iPad. When the Atom was cranked up to Menlow's 1.3GHz ceiling, the Windows XP tablet was able to load faster than the iPad – even with Flash enabled. The simulation leads us to believe that the Moorestown running at a 1.5GHz speed would be even faster.
