I don’t know you, but personally when I hear manufacturers bragging about how their products are supposed to fare against the competition and how their chipsets will trash the ones they’re fighting with I tend to be skeptical about it. So did Steve Paine at UMPC Portal, who put to the test the iPad against the downclocked Viliv V70 MID who uses the Menlow platform, a very similar one to the recently announced Moorestown Atom Z6xx. The Menlow was down-clocked to 800 Mhz for a megahertz to megahertz comparison of the two architectures: ARM vs X86. The Viliv MID was used with the latest version of Google Chrome installed on the default Windows 7 Home Premium OS.

    His finding was that the two platforms are very similar when it comes to typical web browsing tests, but as you know, Moorestown will be clocked to 1.5 GHz for MIDs and will go up to 1.9 GHz for netbooks, so he overclocked the Menlow CPU to 1.3 GHz, where it literally left the iPad in the dust. Imagine what the picture would look like at 1.5GHz or even more. That means you could really use the Moorestown Z6xx Atom CPU to render complex webpages with Flash and Javascript elements, and there’s plenty of performance left for some multitasking. Here’s a short video that shows the iPad versus the Menlow powered Viliv:

    And a graph released by Intel with their own testing results:

    Intel Atom Z6xx browser speed estimated by Intel

    Intel Atom Z6xx browser speed estimated by Intel

    Source: UMPC Portal