We know that Intel is gunning for ARM with its Oak Trail platform, and indeed there were a few early tablets at Computex following that very path to Honeycomb. The question on everyone’s minds, of course, is how well this dual-core 1.5GHz platform can compare to the Tegra 2 competition. If you believe the results from a suite of tests that tweakers.net ran on a prototype Compal unit, then the answer is “not very well.” On benchmarks like CaffeineMark, Linpak, and Quadrant the platform was largely left in the dust by ARM competition with bigger biceps, but the Oak Trail machine did clean the floor with everyone else on the SunSpider browser benchmark. What does it all mean? Not a heck of a lot at this point, we’re afraid. It’s far too early to be drawing performance conclusions about a platform based on a prototype fresh out of the fabricator, and we have our doubts that these benchmark apps are optimized for the new platform — so don’t give up on ‘ol x86 just yet.

Honeycomb on Oak Trail gets benchmarked on prototype Compal tablet, numbers ensue originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:26:00 EST.