Brand new chip outperforms slow chip from 10 months ago!
The Z2460 was launched back in January [1], though phones with it have been very slow to appear.
1 - http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/10/2697790/intel-details-new-...
The Z2460 was launched back in January [1], though phones with it have been very slow to appear.
1 - http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/10/2697790/intel-details-new-...
http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/18/motorolas-razr-i-benchmar...
Also, it's important to note that JS engine optimizations play a huge role in this test, so it's not all just hardware performance, but that doesn't necessarily mean Intel has a disadvantage here. I believe Intel has been working just as heavily to tweak the JS performance in the phones that shipped with their processor.
Also, Intel is being misleading about having a "2 Ghz processor". The thing is it will use that frequency when it's doing the benchmark, so you'll be like "wow, great performance from this chip", but then in 99% of the situations, you'll be using it at its "real frequency" of 1.6 Ghz (Anand says it's still 1.3 Ghz, Engadget may be in error there), so the real performance is probably much worse than the benchmakrs make it look.
Running the bench on a 4S running iOS6 should fix that.
According to the article (and the original source on anandtech), the actual insight provided by SunSpider is its stressing of the memory interface (this was apparently Intel's original explanation for why Atom crushed A9-based SoC in SunSpider even though the raw processing power was pretty similar), and is a datapoint in support of the hypothesis that Apple's custom core design put a high emphasis on on improving the memory subsystem (and much higher than the stock ARM designs).