Yes, the Razr i lost (mostly modestly) on 4 out of 5 performance benchmarks, but...
1. It modestly won on power consumption (9 hours vs 8).
2. Quoting from the review: "Aside from the benchmark results outlined above, the Medfield entry offered a marginally faster response to most actions."
3. Drawing CPU vs CPU conclusions from several benchmarks is complicated by one of the other differences between the two phones - the GPU (which is mostly an orthogonal question).
Oh, and then there's that benchmark the RAZR i won, by almost a factor of 2: SunSpider. While SunSpider has its limitations, it's the most still relevant benchmark of the set to the discussion we're having right now. And this performance difference has real-world consequences (another quote): "The results remain largely unchanged, but after spending a week with the device, we'd like to add that the web browser still gives a superb performance."
Intel's problem in mobile has never been performance (except when self-inflicted and they're past that). As of last year, it isn't power consumption either. Today, Intel's last problem is modems (specifically LTE modems), and they're hard at work on that one too: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013...
Finally, Intel's tagline for Silvermont is "~3X the Performance or ~5X Lower Power". If they pull that off and integrate it with a competitive LTE modem (and those are both still significant ifs even though today's indications look good), that's a ~2X SunSpider combined with a separate ~3X CPU leap. That won't just multiply because the bottlenecks will shift and SunSpider is the wrong benchmark CPU-bound JavaScript anyway. But however it plays out, that still would close a big chunk of the mobile-desktop JavaScript performance gap, especially when you notice that this year's Haswell focused on power consumption and, at best, only offers a small performance bump over last year's Ivy Bridge.
It isn't a lock, but it isn't a possibility to dismiss either.
Yes, the Razr i lost (mostly modestly) on 4 out of 5 performance benchmarks, but...
1. It modestly won on power consumption (9 hours vs 8).
2. Quoting from the review: "Aside from the benchmark results outlined above, the Medfield entry offered a marginally faster response to most actions."
3. Drawing CPU vs CPU conclusions from several benchmarks is complicated by one of the other differences between the two phones - the GPU (which is mostly an orthogonal question).
Oh, and then there's that benchmark the RAZR i won, by almost a factor of 2: SunSpider. While SunSpider has its limitations, it's the most still relevant benchmark of the set to the discussion we're having right now. And this performance difference has real-world consequences (another quote): "The results remain largely unchanged, but after spending a week with the device, we'd like to add that the web browser still gives a superb performance."
Intel's problem in mobile has never been performance (except when self-inflicted and they're past that). As of last year, it isn't power consumption either. Today, Intel's last problem is modems (specifically LTE modems), and they're hard at work on that one too: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013...
Finally, Intel's tagline for Silvermont is "~3X the Performance or ~5X Lower Power". If they pull that off and integrate it with a competitive LTE modem (and those are both still significant ifs even though today's indications look good), that's a ~2X SunSpider combined with a separate ~3X CPU leap. That won't just multiply because the bottlenecks will shift and SunSpider is the wrong benchmark CPU-bound JavaScript anyway. But however it plays out, that still would close a big chunk of the mobile-desktop JavaScript performance gap, especially when you notice that this year's Haswell focused on power consumption and, at best, only offers a small performance bump over last year's Ivy Bridge.
It isn't a lock, but it isn't a possibility to dismiss either.