The iPhone 6 Review
by Joshua Ho, Brandon Chester, Chris Heinonen & Ryan Smith on September 30, 2014 8:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone 6
CPU Performance
Now that we have a good idea of what the A8 SoC looks like, we can talk about performance. While we covered this in the preliminary article, it’s worth going over again. For those that are unfamiliar with our test suite the CPU-based tests are mostly browser-based benchmarks. Once again, although I’m not quite happy with the state of benchmarking things we’re getting close to a more platform-agnostic solution.
For the most part, the A8 SoC performs admirably despite the relatively low (1.38 GHz) frequency and half the cores when compared to competing SoCs. It seems that this is mostly building upon the lead that A7's Cyclone CPUs began. It remains to be seen if other SoC manufacturers will catch up in their CPU architecture at one point or another (NVIDIA's Project Denver in particular is interesting), but for now Apple seems to be quite far in the lead in CPU performance.
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akdj - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
Who uses their smartphone to sit and look at the UI? Or. Thats right. You. Can't find any apps that'll work? I'm on my springboard for a second or three. Like you said, pull down, enter the first letter or two of the software/app I'm going to use and click, it's open!No more just looking at the 'floating (?) blobs that sit in rows (like Android)non a screen. Designed for teenagers, grandmas, commercial and military pilots. Military operations you're clueless about and 95% of the Fortune 500 companies have deployed iOS.
And unfortunately for you, if you're NOT an iOS user, I completely 'get it'. I've got both an iPhone 5s and Note 3. Love em both but the Note is a tool for a very specific job I so that uses the SPen to do some amazing stuff that wouldn't be as 'cool' as on graph paper. Other than that, I don't care the app you name, Id it's in parity with iOS, I GUARANTEED iOS runs circles around the Android port. As well the optomized tablet apps are overwhelmingly in favor of iOS, and the biggest challenge with the the Note in different apps I've noticed. They're apps designed for 4.3-4.7" displays and the developers aren't tsking the time to 're-do' their tab apps. They're just blown up leaving a load of white space, sparse UI and pretty lame performance as they're not yet 'coding' to take advantage of multiple core computing. Nearly EVERY app in either environment runs on a single core.
Mind blowing though you've spent that much time looking at 'blobs' and haven't figured out that IF you TOUCH the 'blob' something really REALLY Cool might just happen!
Go ahead. You won't break it
J
steven75 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Smaller phones tend to be cheaper? The rest cost the same? No, a single part like the display could be cheaper, but there are very real costs to miniaturization.Samsung phones not only look cheap because of the plastic, they feel cheap in hand as well. It's not the material--It's what Samsung does with it. Nokia for instance makes some plastic phones that look good and feel great. Samsung comes out with phones that look like band-aids and have fake leather stitching molded into them.
danbob999 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
There you go. Samsung phones are not cheap. You *think* they *feel* cheap. That's your opinion and not based on any fact. Whether a phone is cheap has nothing to do with look or feel.And yes, smaller phones ARE cheaper. The iPhone 6 Plus is more expensive to make. The A8 SoC and all other chips are not smaller in the iPhone 6 so there is no additional miniaturization. Only the display and the battery are smaller, and both are cheaper. iFixit teardowns have shown for years that Galaxy S-series are most expensive to make than iPhones.
mrochester - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Doesn't that mean Apple did a good thing? To make a product like the iPhone for less than it costs Samsung to make their Galaxy devices sounds like a big win to me.danbob999 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Of course it is a win for Apple and their shareholders. Not for their customers.Of course it is cheaper to put half the RAM, a small display and a small battery.
bigstrudel - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
RAM has power costs idiot. It's not worth it just so lazy people don't have to close tabs.You must've missed the part where they tested that 1800mah battery and it beat up on devices with 50% more juice.
danbob999 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
I am not saying the iPhone is a bad device.But don't call cheap a phone with more expensive components juste because the shell is in plastic. That's all I am saying.
mrochester - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
I think the expression was relating to the device feeling cheap in the hand, not the actual BOM.danbob999 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
@mrochesterIs this a tech site or a teenager fashion magazine? Why would anyone care about how cheap it feels in the hand as long as it is a good device?
A metal enclosure with no electronics in it may not feel cheap in the hand but it would be useless. What matters is inside.
Hemlocke - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Not true, even in the slightest. The thermal envelope on a material with superior heat-dissipating properties, like 6003 aluminum, versus that of a polycarbonate device, with a poor thermal envelope, is important.Having superior heat-dissipating properties means your components can operate at capacity longer, and they also last longer. All you need to do is look at throttling on the S5, compared to the HTC One M8, and you can see a huge difference in extended performance.