ASUS Transformer Book T100 Windows 8.1 Hybrid

Test Methodology -

We benchmarked the Asus T100 against a set of x86 devices and other tablets. Because a number of products now ship in multiple form factors, the goal is to capture how shipping Bay Trail compares to other lightweight notebooks or tablets rather than against a single form factor or identical configs.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the original netbooks was the huge gap between Atom and conventional x86 CPUs. AMD's Brazos was somewhat better in this regard, but there was still a huge performance delta between a "big-core" x86 processor and the svelte options from AMD or Intel. We've already seen that Kabini can close this gap at relatively high power consumption, so what about Bay Trail?

Cinebench 11.5:


Cinebench 11.5 shows the Bay Trail CPU nearly doubling Clover Trail's performance in single-threaded tests, and almost tripling it in the multi-threaded variant. It's still slower than the various other options, including desktop variants, but multi-threaded performance in particular is much closer to the older Sandy Bridge CPU.

LAME MT:


In our MP3 encoding test, the T100 is again significantly faster than the Clover Trail it replaces, but slips a bit compared to the higher-clocked Intel (Atom Z3770 Bay Trail) and faster AMD cores.

Sunspider v1:


In the long-running Sunspider Javascript benchmark, Clover Trail finally has an opportunity to shine. The core here is even faster than the brand-new Surface 2, though only by a whisker. The comparison is fairly apt, since the NVIDIA system is also a quad-core tablet with a 1.7GHz clock. Intel's Atom chips have always excelled in Sunspider, and this is very much in evidence here.

3DMark: Ice Storm


In 3DMark Ice Storm, the Bay Trail device is a middle-of-the-road performer. Updated drivers give it a stronger physics score than we initially saw from the Z3770 reference design from Intel, but its graphics performance is limited by clock speed and comes in behind the higher-clocked version of Intel's Bay Trail (Atom Z3770) design on the whole.

NVIDIA's SHIELD continues to distinguish itself in these tests. That's not particularly surprising either, given that SHEILD has an active cooling system and spends a great deal more of its transistor budget on cutting-edge graphics.