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.
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darwinosx - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
The Nvidia based tablets use a crap os and development tools. iPad Air destroys it now in real world and the next one even more so.kron123456789 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
iPad Air destroys Nvidia Shield Tablet with...what? Games for K1 using OpenGL 4.x, not mobile OpenGL ES 3.0. And iOS doesn't have games like Half-Life 2, Portal or Trine 2: Complete Edition. BTW, games with Metal(like Asphalt 8 or MC5) have only a little more particles. Besides, i was talking about hardware, not software.djgandy - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Yeah no catching them in their sales figures either....darwinosx - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Uh you don't know what you are talking about. These are synthetic benchmarks. Throw in games developed with metal and they will destroy everything else out there.Havekk - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
You fan boys on both side crack me up. Does it make your dick bigger if the iPhone is the No. 1 selling phone and you have one? Do you all realize how physiologically damaged you are? Why can't you just buy the phone you like and shut the fuck up? Why must everyone bend and come to the same conclusion you did when purchasing your phone? Fact is, you're a joke. You can sit here and spout all the numbers you want claiming whatever you'd like. The fact is, people will buy the phone that suits them better. I am currently using a Galaxy S4 from my work and an iPad 3. I'm buying the Galaxy Tab S 10.5 and my work is getting me an iPhone 6. They both have their uses. They're both great products. Why must people stick a fucking flag in the ground behind one of these companies who don't get a flying fish turd about you? You make yourself look like a moron. Jebus fucking christ you people drive me nuts.ColinByers - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
Well, either way. There's nothing that will match the HTC One M8 overall (see http://www.consumertop.com/best-phone-guide/ for example) currently. Apple just can't do it, instead they lag behind.blackcrayon - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Physics test is CPU and is very light on GPU. It might be something that Metal could help with, but it's one area where having multiple cores helps (im not sure to what degree it would help in real world games though).simonh - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
> Adding this to the mix means that the iPhone 6 is just 10% faster than a good old iPhone 5 according to physics test.That's the 5s, not the 5. The 5s processor, released last year, was the first 64-bit ARM CPU and a true performance monster fully twice as fast as the chip in the orriginal iPhone 5. In terms of architecture the chip in the iPhone 6 is a relatively minor iteration on that epic CPU.
apunari - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Wait for A9. The tick usually introduces new design. The tock boosts the performance. Just like intel.paravorheim - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Isn't the tick a process node change usually, and a tock being a new design?