Benchmarking the last Atom smartphone SoC (Anandtech)

[watercooled]

Ian at Anandtech got his hands on 'the last' Atom smartphone to run a browser benchmark: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12592...2018-benchmark

In a way, it's a shame we've lost some competition in that marketplace what with Qualcomm almost single-handedly owning the SoC market apart from vertically integrated companies like Samsung, Huawei and Apple. On the other hand when said competitor tried to bruteforce their way into said market with free processors which were barely competitive even then, and they don't have a particularly rosy history when it comes to competing as the performance underdog.

At least ARM doesn't carry the same platform lock-in as x86 i.e. other companies are free to compete without being denied access to the ISA, and there's at least some competitive pressure e.g. Qualcomm have to do well or they'll end up losing design wins to Exynos, Kirin, etc. And we really wouldn't want to be locked into x86 and a single supplier on a platform where it offers no advantages!

Having said all that, there are probably still a few diehard fanboys who insist anything but Atom on a phone is painfully slow and lacking 'fluidity'.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Intel giving away Atom essentially screwed over both AMD and Nvidia from even competing in Android tablets.

[watercooled]

Yeah that's a shame - both had some really decent parts available, especially the later stuff AMD had based on their Jaguar cores, and the Tegra stuff using the more modern GPU architectures.

[DanceswithUnix]

In a way, it's a shame we've lost some competition in that marketplace what with Qualcomm almost single-handedly owning the SoC market apart from vertically integrated companies like Samsung, Huawei and Apple.

I think competition has been pretty good in that marketplace. Qualcomm have to work pretty hard, Intel's product wasn't up to scratch and was rejected by the market, Nvidia kept breaking promises on things like power budget until no-one would work with them (which is a shame as I think the later Tegra chips are pretty good). It's a shame that AMD's chips never even got a look in, but TBH I don't think they would have survived in tablets long term for the same reason the Atom isn't doing so well: x86 needs big silicon to work well and doesn't scale down.

[watercooled]

Yeah that's quite true, though I guess the likes of AMD and Nvidia's parts might have been more well-suited to the crossover sort of tablets rather than the scaled-up smartphones.

WRT Qualcomm and slightly off-topic, I do wonder what Qualcomm's rumoured 32 bit Krait successor would have been like if marketing forces hadn't forced them to release the 810 as it was. It seems like Qualcomm's custom cores are more targeted at the server market now with their mobile SoCs using customised ARM IP cores.

Samsung's M3 is very interesting, but based on Anantech's testing it seems something like DVFS is killing real-world performance by having an overly sluggish governor. Power per core is relatively high (which makes me wonder why they didn't stick with two cores given the realistic power budget of a phone), but so are Apple's cores.