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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realbabilu - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
The javascript test based on Apple Socs always high since it use direct javascript engine on chip called Nitro. It is more like "SSE" for javascript. In other hand for calculation matrix, etc, cpu just run the physics test like other instruction, thats where A7 / A8 loses to other high clocked cpus.FrenchMac - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
No Nitro is just a JIT version of the Apple JavaScript Engine (like V8 in Chrome). It has nothing to do with SSE for JavaScript. A7/A8 executes more instruction per cycle than competing CPU (in 64 bits in particular).The Hardcard - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
To be excused, you must be specific as to what you mean.Valis - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Check the score of iPhone 6 here, scroll down a bit. Compared to the others.http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-...
Kureno - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
That battery test is used with a web script of some kind. Depending on bluetooth, wifi, signal strenght, brightness and a few other factors and as well what web browser that is used and how well optimized the browser is for each phone and how power hungry each browser is.That's why I don't trust the webscript battery test so much.
robbie rob - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
agreedminifi - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
So? Just because this comparison rates the iPhone much higher "it looks rigged"? Why, because you want it to?designerfx - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Not everyone performs their tests the exact same way. However, it is notable that iphone is not leading the pack for battery life, even brand new.name99 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
The Xperia Z3, for example, a phone that does extremely well on that test, has a 3100mAh battery, as compared to the 1810 of the iPhone6. So the iPhone6 gets more "active life" per energy unit than the Experia Z3 does (and probably any other phone on their list).It's a matter of choice what to make of this. APPLE has prioritized thinness and weight over other things --- they appear to have target battery lives in mind, for laptops, iPads, iPhones (and probably watches) and when they hit the target they start shrinking the device. If YOU don't like this and think more battery is warranted, of course you're going to prefer a thicker device.
What is NOT a matter of choice but an empirical fact is the power efficiency of the device, and Apple appears to be the winner here with the current crop of flagship phones.
darwinosx - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
The difference is nobody buys the Xperia and Apple sold 10 million iPhone 6's in three days. Quality wins over synthetic benchmarks every day.