Clover Trail+

We find ourselves at another Mobile World Congress, discussing another Intel Atom based smartphone SoC. While last year we were talking about faster and lower performing versions of the Medfield family, this year there’s a new topic for discussion: Clover Trail+. Here’s where Intel’s codenames start getting a bit confusing. Medfield was the original 32nm Atom SoC for smartphones, while Clover Trail was the 32nm platform for Windows 8 tablets. Clover Trail+ is still a 32nm Atom based SoC but it can be used in phones and tablets. Architecturally, Clover Trail+ takes the Medfield platform, adds a second CPU core (and leaves Hyper Threading enabled), dramatically improves GPU performance and introduces the same memory controller enhancements that were present in the original Clover Trail. Compared to...