iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus: Preliminary Results
by Joshua Ho on September 22, 2014 7:07 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iOS
- iPhone 6
- iPhone 6 Plus
While we’re still working on the full review, I want to get out some preliminary results for the iPhone 6. For now, this means some basic performance data and battery life, which include browser benchmarks, game-type benchmarks, and our standard web browsing battery life test. There’s definitely a lot more to talk about for this phone, but this should give an idea of what to expect in the full review. To start, we'll look at the browser benchmarks, which can serve as a relatively useful proxy for CPU performance.
There are a few interesting observations here, as a great deal of the scaling is above what one would expect from the minor frequency bump when comparing A7 and A8. In SunSpider, we see about a 13% increase in performance that can't be explained by frequency increases alone. For Kraken, this change is around 7.5%, and we see a similar trend across the board for the rest of these tests. This points towards a relatively similar underlying architecture, although it's still too early to tell how much changes between the A7 and A8 CPU architectures. Next, we'll look at GPU performance in 3DMark and GFXBench, although we're still working on figuring out the exact GPU in A8.
In in GPU benchmarks, we generally see a pretty solid lead over the competition for the iPhone 6/A8. It's seems quite clear that there is a significant impact to GPU performance in the iPhone 6 Plus due to the 2208x1242 resolution that all content is rendered at. It seems that this is necessary though, as the rendering system for iOS cannot easily adapt to arbitrary resolutions and display sizes. Before we wrap up this article though, I definitely need to address battery life. As with all of our battery life tests, we standardize on 200 nits and ensure that our workload in the web browsing test has a reasonable amount of time in all power states of an SoC.
As one can see, it seems that Apple has managed to do something quite incredible with battery life. Normally an 1810 mAh battery with 3.82V nominal voltage would be quite a poor performer, but the iPhone 6 is a step above just about every other Android smartphone on the market. The iPhone 6 Plus also has a strong showing, although not quite delivering outrageous levels of battery life the way the Ascend Mate 2 does. That's it for now, but the full review should be coming in the near future.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
316 Comments
View All Comments
Sofia - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus are obviously stronger than their competitors in general. This overview brings Apple new smartphones.http://www.appiphany.com.au
euklid81 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
So you pick and choose the benchmarks that show iphone6 ahead to say it beats other Android phones? Where's antutu and geekbench, oh wait those show phones such as 6 month galaxy s5 faster than iphone 6 plus lol.jacure123 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
They are so Apple bias, that's why the Indian guy that started the site is now working for Apple.lol.Tim Cook was like ' good job Asian man for making us look good on your site".
lilo777 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
I hope I am wrong but it is possible that the author's choice of benchmarks was heavily influenced by the fact that Anandtech Inc owner now works for Apple.jacure123 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Bingo!busky2k - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Arstechnica have just released their own battery testing. The author notes day to day use was similar to a 5S and the android flagships actually outlasted the 6+ in their own metric test. Interesting.http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/iphone-6-and-...
golem - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
The author of the Arstechinca author notes this about their battery testing, "But the short answer is I know our current test is limited and we're working on better ones, I just keep1 getting2 sidetracked3 by other stuff4."kgelner - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
They also note the battery life is better than the sheer numbers would indicate:"Chalk it up to something our Wi-Fi test can't really measure—Apple is pretty good at tamping down idle power usage, at least when your signal is good. I've had an iPhone 6 Plus sitting on my desk all day, buzzing at me only sporadically as new Twitter and Messages notifications come in. It's been sitting at a 90 percent charge for at least the last two hours"
Because real people don't browse for 10 hours straight, they are doing stuff in-between. The less power consumption happens during those periods, the longer the real-world battery life is.
thetanman17 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
This.DeciusStrabo - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
So? This way even my Moto X (2013) doesn't go below 70 % after one full day of "use".