According to the test, the Airmont core in this particular platform is 2.3% faster on a per-core basis and about 10.6% faster when all four cores are being used.
Now, leaks have suggested that the Airmont CPU core as part of the Cherry Trail platform will run at 2.7GHz maximum frequency. So, this might initially lead one to believe that at "full" performance, the Cherry Trail will perform significantly better. However, if we were to scale the results of the "1.6GHz" Cherry Trail to 2.7GHz, we'd get about 1500 for the single-core score and 4915 for the multicore score.
This would be too large of an improvement to expect generation on generation (that multicore score is roughly in-line with an Ultrabook-oriented Broadwell chip), so my guess is that the "1.6GHz" refers to the base frequency and that the chip can "turbo" up to a higher frequency if the thermal headroom exists. This is exactly what the Silvermont core inside of the Atom Z3580 tested here does. (Although Intel does not publish the base clocks for the Z3580, the Atom Z3795 -- built on the same process and using the same core -- runs at a base clock of 1.59GHz and can turbo to 2.39GHz.)
Airmont looks like a mere die-shrink of Silvermont
Although we should wait for final production tablet performance numbers to be sure, these initial numbers dont suggest a large improvement for Airmont over Silvermont.
This is very reminiscent of the Haswell to Broadwell transition for Intels big-core line, where Broadwell offered minimal architectural enhancements over Haswell, with the performance-per-watt gains seemingly coming from the transition to the more advanced 14-nanometer manufacturing technology.
While this should be "good enough" for the company's Braswell processor for low-end PCs and for midrange tablet chips, I think Intel will need the next generation core -- known as Goldmont -- in order to make real strides against the competition in the high end of the mobile market.
