iPhone 5/A6 SunSpider Performance: Faster than Intel's Atom Z2460
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on September 19, 2012 12:49 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone 5
The first iPhone 5 reviews have lifted, confirming the leaked Geekbench data we saw in our earlier post. Apple's A6 appears to feature two custom ARM cores running at up to 1GHz. A new datapoint comes courtesy of our own Brian Klug who's currently visiting LG in Seoul, South Korea. He ran into Vincent Nguyen of Slashgear fame, who kindly let him run SunSpider 0.9.1 on Vincent's iPhone 5 review sample. The score? 914.7ms.
SunSpider is quickly outlasting its welcome as a smartphone benchmark, but it does do a great job of highlighting issues with the Cortex A9's memory interface. Intel originally hinted at issues in the A9's memory interface as being why Atom was able to so easily outperform other ARM based SoCs in SunSpider. As we surmised in our A6 Geekbench post, it looks like Apple specifically targeted improvements in the memory subsystem when designing the A6's CPU cores. The result is the fastest SunSpider test we've ever recorded on a smartphone - faster even than Intel's Atom Z2460.
This doesn't tell us much about the A6's architecture other than it's likely got a better cache/memory interface than ARM's Cortex A9. What we really need is for someone to port SPECint to iOS...
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yogi6807 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
i was on the gl bewnch web site nothing came close to 6000. the 4s scored 1158 it says. the highest score to it was 3445 the xiaomi mi 2. that looks pretty good to me. i just cant figure out what the second test is.yogi6807 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
i hope i looked at the right thingAchtung_BG - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
iPhone 5 is already on the market, waiting for a detailed test of the A6 chipTechDenzo - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
And got a score of 1791.3ms. Looks pretty good to me. I have no idea what this really means, but thats what a 4S gets. I have everything on (Wifi, BT, 3G etc) 64GB model nearly full in memory as well if that makes a difference.eliway - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
Just got 1030 on my HTC one X at&t with a custom kernel. Also got 1800 on geekbench (compared to 1600 on the iPhone 5, higher scores are better).I think what it shows here is that both Qualcomm and Apple chose not to use A15s due to battery concerns, and their custom arquitectures are actually quite comparable.
Also, I think Sunspider should not be used as a reliable test/benchmark, even for memory interface measurements... For example, using chrome I get 1900ms while on stock browser I get 1000. Stock is almost twice as fast!
These differences in software could potentially get pretty misleading results, and I think any reputable and respected tech site that takes its reporting seriously should find an alternative that's not so reliant on software.
john1506 - Saturday, November 10, 2012 - link
I got 912ms 😎 on the lumia 920lolzxdrofl - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
I've runed the sun spider test 5 times on my lg optimus G on the default browser and i get 1250 on my sun spider, idk how yours got 1600Zekk98 - Friday, December 28, 2012 - link
I am responding to this post because the LG Optimus G results are seriously off I have the LG Optimus G and I consistently get scores around 1000-1250ms and have yet to get any higher. I can easily provide screenshots or a video showing the phone as I do the benchmark, I just hate to see this phone be shown inaccurately for potential buyers.SantoBr - Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - link
Chrome Beta 25.0.1364.47 running Android 4.0.4 on Motorola XT9101286.9ms
http://goo.gl/7PCl2
1324.2ms
http://goo.gl/E9C97
Gnius101 - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
My iphone5 score is 748.5mshttp://m.imgur.com/godDPwk
What does it mean?