Intel Atom-packing Orange Santa Clara benchmarked

Intel are serious about getting into the mobile phone business with phones like the Orange Santa Clara. The Intel Atom Z2460 chipset however drew some ridicule for its single CPU core.

Early benchmarks show, however, that the single (but HyperThreading-capable) core packs a lot of punch. A lucky CeBIT visitor had a chance to run a couple of browser-based benchmarks, which are easier to access than dedicated apps.

The Santa Clara scored nearly 90K on BrowserMark, beating an iPhone 4S by a slight margin. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which uses the highly-optimized Android 4.0 ICS browser, scores over 100K on this benchmark, but the Santa Clara is still on Gingerbread and should see its scores jump after the planned ICS update.

 
Orange Santa Clara vs. iPhone 4S in BrowserMark

The Intel-based droid also posted some impressive scores on Vellamo. It managed to outpace the Galaxy Nexus and placed behind the quad-core Asus Transformer Prime and the dual-core Xiaomi Mi-One Plus.

  
Santa Clara's Vellamo benchmark

The Orange Santa Clara used for these tests ran Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread and its Atom CPU was reportedly clocked at 1.4GHz. Browser-based benchmarks are not the best at pushing several CPUs to their limit (and much less when it comes to the GPU), but these are pretty encouraging results, especially with a dual-core Atom chipset on the way.

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News : Intel announce two new Atom CPUs for phones and tablets

Intel is serious about getting a piece of the handheld action this time - they announced two new processors and chipsets to join what's already powering the likes of the Lenovo K800 and the Orange Santa Clara.

The first processor is called Atom Z2580 and features two cores (the same Medfield design like the fist one) with HyperThreading allowing the processor to run four threads simultaneously. It will be clocked at 1.3GHz, potentially going up to 1.8GHz with Turbo Boosts.

It's paired with a powerful GPU too - PowerVR SGX544MP2, which is supposed to double the performance of an SGX543MP2 found in the iPhone 4S.

Intel have their own LTE-capable modem that will work with the Atom Z2580 and all these components will be shown off in a brand new reference design.

With a little luck, it will go the way of the Santa Clara and be offered as a consumer phone too. However, that's unlikely to happen before the first half of 2013 at the earliest .

The second chipset includes the Atom Z2000, a low-end single-core processor running at 1GHz and without HyperThreading. There's a downclocked SGX540 GPU and an Intel-made HSPA+ modem.

The Atom Z2000 will get its own reference design and will target low-end phones. There's no word on availability, but probably won't be soon either.

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