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Intel 'Silvermont' chip demo makes old Atom look lame

Want to buy a Windows 8 or Android tablet with Intel inside? Wait for Slivermont.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
Intel just killed off its existing Atom if the Computex demo of the redesigned Atom is any indication of real world performance. The system with the upcoming Silvermont Atom is on the middle
Intel just killed off its existing Atom if the Computex demo of the redesigned Atom is any indication of real world performance. The system with the upcoming Silvermont Atom is in the middle. Intel

Here's some good advice. Wait for Intel's upcoming Silvermont chip.

In a demo Wednesday at Computex, Intel seemed to instantly -- and thoroughly -- obsolete the existing Atom, known as "Clover Trail," in a head-to-head "bake off," as the Intel demo guy put it.

The "current best-in-class Intel Atom-based tablet" (Clover Trail) was pitted against a tablet with the upcoming (and completely redesigned) quad-core Silvermont Atom (aka, "Bay Trail") packing a new "video encoder and decoder."

The benchmark, TouchXPRT, tests "performance of everyday [tasks] such as photo editing and videos," according to Intel. The demo took two videos and transcoded (converted) them from MPEG-4 to H.264.

Despite starting the Clover Trail Atom tablet first, the Silvermont system quickly caught up and then finished "well before" (quoting the demo guy) Clover Trail.

Check it out at the 34:00 minute mark.

On Tuesday, Intel said Silvermont will offer 2X the CPU (central processing unit) and 3X the GPU (graphics processing unit) performance of the current Atom technology in the market.

Silvermont will "enable sleek designs with eight or more hours of battery life and weeks of standby, as well as support Android and Windows 8.1," Intel said.