The iPhone 5s Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 17, 2013 9:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone
- iPhone 5S
Battery Life
Brian did some excellent sleuthing and came across battery capacities for both the iPhone 5s and 5c in Apple’s FCC disclosures. The iPhone 5 had a 3.8V 5.45Wh battery, while the 5s boosts total capacity to 5.96Wh (an increase of 9.35%). The move to a 28nm process doesn’t come with all of the benefits of a full node shrink, and it’s likely not enough to completely offset the higher potential power draw of a much beefier SoC. Apple claims the same or better battery life on the 5s compared to the iPhone 5, in practice the answer is a bit more complicated.
Unlike previous designs, we’ve never had a half node shrink for an s-SKU. Both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S stayed on the same process node as their predecessor and drove up performance. In the case of the 3GS, the performance gains outweighed their power cost, while in the case of the iPhone 4S we generally saw a regression.
The iPhone 5s improves power consumption by going to 28nm, but turns that savings into increased performance. The SoC also delivers a wider dynamic range of performance than we’ve ever seen from an Apple device. There’s as much CPU power here as the first 11-inch MacBook Air, and more GPU power than an iPad 4.
To find out the balance of power savings vs. additional performance I turned to our current battery life test suite, which we first introduced with the iPhone 5 review last year.
We'll start with our WiFi battery life test. As always, we regularly load web pages at a fixed interval until the battery dies (all displays are calibrated to 200 nits).
The iPhone 5s regresses a bit compared to the 5 in this test (~12% reduction despite the larger battery). We're loading web pages very aggressively here, likely keeping the A7 cores running at their most power hungry state. Even the 5c sees a bit of a regression compared to the 5, which makes me wonder if we're seeing some of the effects of an early iOS 7 release here.
The story on LTE is a bit different. Here we see a slight improvement in battery life compared to the iPhone 5, although the larger battery of the 5s doesn't seem to give it anything other than parity with the 5c:
Our cellular talk time test is almost entirely display and SoC independent, turning it mostly into a battery capacity test:
You can see the close grouping of the smaller iPhones at the bottom of the chart. There's a definite improvement in call time compared to the iPhone 5. We're finally up above iPhone 4S levels there.
Our Egypt HD based 3D battery life test gives us the first indication that Rogue, at least running fairly light code, can be more power efficient than the outgoing 5XT. Obviously the G6430 implemented here can run at fairly high performance levels, so I'm fully expecting peak power consumption to be worse but for more normal workloads there's no regression at all - a very good sign.
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akdj - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
I completely agree---that said, we're really only 5 years 'in'. The original iPhone in '07, a true Android follow up in late '07/early '08---those were crap. Not really necessary to 'bench' them. We all kinda knew the performance we could expect, same for the next generation or two. In the past three years---Moore's law has swung in to high gear, these are now---literally---replacement computers (along with tablets) for the majority of the population. They're not using their home desktop anymore for email, Facebook, surfing and recipes. Even gaming---unless their @ 'work' and in front of their 'work Dell' from 2006, they're on their smartphones...for literally everything! In these past three years---and it seems Anand, Brian and crew are quite 'up front' about the lack of mobile testing applications and software----we're in it's infancy. 36 real months in with software, hardware and OS'es worth 'testing, benchmarking, and measuring' their performance. Just my opinion....and I suppose we're saying the same thing.That said---even Google's new Octane test was and is being used lately---GeekBench has revised their software, it's coming is my point. But just looking at those differences in the generations of iPhones makes it blatantly obvious how far we've come in 4/5 short years. In 2008 and 9---these were still phones with easier ways to text and access the internet, some cool apps and ways to take, manipulate and share pics and videos. Today----they do literally everything an actual computer does and I'd bet---in a lot of cases, these phones are as or more powerful, faster and more acessible than those ancient beige boxes from the mid 2000s a lot of folks have in their home office;)
Duck <(' ) - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
they are posting false benchmark scores. Same phones score different in youtube vids.iPhone 5 browsermark 2 score is around 2300
check here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iATFnXociC4
sgs4 scores 2745 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdNE4NoFq8U
ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Actually, there are quite a lot of discrepancies in this review.For starters, the "CPU performance" page only contains JS benchmarks and not a single native application. And iOS and Android use entirely different JS engines, so this is literally a case of comparing apples to oranges.
Native benchmarks don't compare the new apple chip to "old 32 bit v7 chips" - it only compares the new apple chip to the old ones, and also compares the new chip in 32bit and 64 bit mode. Oddly enough, the geekbench at engadget shows tegra 4 actually being faster.
Then, there is the inclusion of hardware implementation in charts that are supposed to show the benefits of 64bit execution mode, but in reality the encryption workloads are handled in a fundamentally different way in the two modes, in software in 32bit mode and implemented in hardware in 64bit mode. This turns the integer performance chart from a mixed bad into one falsely advertising performance gains attributed to 64bit execution and not to the hardware implementations as it should. The FP chart also shows no miracles, wider SIMD units result in almost 2x the score in few tests, nothing much in the rest.
All in all, I'd say this is a very cleverly compiled review, cunningly deceitful to show the new apple chip in a much better light than it is in reality. No surprises, considering this is AT, it would be more unexpected to see an unbiased review.
I guess we will have to wait a bit more until mass availability for unbiased reviews, considering all those "featured" reviews usually come with careful guidelines by the manufacturer that need to be followed to create an unrealistically good presentation of the product. That is the price you have to pay to get the new goodies first - play by the rules of a greedy and exploitative industry. Corporate "honesty" :)
I don't say the new chip is bad, I just say it is deliberately presented unrealistically good. Krait has expanded the SIMD units to 128 bit as well, so we should see similar performance even without the move to a 64bit ecosystem. Last but not least, 64bit code bloats the memory footprint of applications because of pointers being twice as big, and while those limited memory footprint synthetic benches play well with the single gigabyte of ram on this device, I expect an actual performance demanding real world application will be bottlenecked by the ram capacity. All in all, the decision to go for 64 bit architecture is mostly a PR stunt, surely, 64bit is the future, but in the case of this product, and considering its limited ram capacity, it doesn't really make all that sense, but is something that will no doubt keep up the spirit of apple fanboys, and make up for their declining sales while they bring out the iphone 6, which will close all those deliberately left gaping holes in the 5s.
Slaanesh - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Interesting comment. I'd like to know what Anand has to say about this.ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
I am betting my comment will most likely vanish mysteriously. I'd be happy to see my concerns addressed though, but I admit I am putting Anand in a very inconvenient position.Mondozai - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
It's all a conspiracy. In fact your comment has already disappeared, but in its place is now a hologram effect that makes it impossible to tell it from the blank space. So why put in the hologram and not just delete it? Because Anand is playing mind games with us.And who said I typed this comment? It could have been someone else, someone doing Anand's bidding.
I admit I am putting his scheme of deception in a very difficult position right now.
/s
ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Few days ago I posted a comment criticizing AT moderators being idle and tolerant of the "I make $$$ sitting in front of my mac" spam, few minutes later my comment was removed while the spam remained, which led me to expect similar fate for this comment. Good thing I was wrong ;)WardenOfBats - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
I'd honestly like to see your misleading comment removed as well. You seem to think that anyone cares what the 32bit performance is of the 5S when everyone knows damn well that app developers are going to be clamouring to switch to the 64bit tech (that Android doesn't even have or support) to get these power increases. Other than that, the rest of your comment is just nonsense. The whole point is that the iPhone 5S is faster and the fact that they use different JS engines is a part of that. Apple just knows how to make software optimizations and hardware that runs them faster and you can see how they just blow the competition away.CyberAngel - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
Misleading? Yes! In favor of Apple!You need to double the memory lines, too and caches and...oh boy!
The next Apple CPU will be "corrected" and THEN we'll see...hopefully RAM is 8GB...
Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
As we often have to remind people, we don't delete comments unless they're spam. However when we do so, any child comments become orphaned and lose their place in the hierarchy, becoming posts at the end of the thread. Your comment isn't going anywhere, nor have any of your previous comments.