Things are changing at Intel. In the desktop world, the company is used to staggering its efforts with a "tick-tock" product cycle. First it manufactures an existing chip design at a smaller size of transistor ("tick") and then, usually a year later, it improves the architecture while sticking to the same transistor size ("tock").Bay Trail, by contrast, is a mobile class chip that represents both a tick and a tock. It makes major changes on previous Clover Trail design, while also shifting from 32nm to 22nm transistors. A jump like that holds major promise, so we were keen to benchmark Bay Trail at the earliest opportunity. Intel allowed us into a hotel room in central London to do just that, using the highest-spec quad-core Z3770 chip inside a reference tablet, and the results look impressive. Read on for the stats and a quick assessment of what they mean.
