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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Aikouka - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
iOS 6 releases today, so he won't need a dev account. :)vdx660 - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Apple's A6 is supposed to win and by a wide margin (not 28% faster) because the test is comparing an Apple A6 (Dual Core) vs an Intel Medfield (Single Core). For fair results this test should be run again when Intel Clover Trail (Dual Core) comes out.Aenean144 - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Sunspider is vastly single threaded.Formul - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
yes because the sunspider is so well multithreaded and they are both on the same frequency ...humancyborg - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Wait, for fair results we need to wait for the competitors to release their newest chipset?How about we just compare devices that are available today and leave the speculation for less intelligent folk.
vdx660 - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - link
I just run Sunspider and tests show that on modern browsers that I tested IE9,IE10, Firefox 15, Chrome 21, it make use of all available processor cores. Running Sunspider on a dual core A6 is supposed to be faster than running on a single core Medfield. You can also see from the Test results that a Samsung Galaxy S3 International (Quad Core) is faster than the Galaxy S3 counterparts that are dual core.thebeastie - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Nice!, I guess with performance like that Apple has some good standing room for its high mark up price.KoolAidMan1 - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
What high price? The iPhone costs about as much as a Galaxy S3 AT&T version, the same one with double the Sunspider score as the iPhone 5bill4 - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
1442 is double 914 now? I knew Obama was ruining the schools but this is crazy.Anyways I'm happy with the GS3 score there. It's 3rd place and not too much worse than latest and greatest iPhone 5. Not bad for an "old" phone. And yes, in the smartphone world a phone that came out (in USA, even earlier elsewhere) in late June is kind of old lol. Plus I understand these benches often depend on software optimization and not raw hardware strength anyway.
And for that matter my GS3 still contains 2GB RAM vs the iPhone 5's 1GB, etc. Not saying the GS3 is stronger than the 5, just that it's no pushover.
Anyways, loooooooooooove my GS3 lol. It usually takes Samsung a while, as a guy who for the most part hated my Galaxy S 1/Captivate, but they tend to get it right eventually. Believe me I experience zero iPhone 5 (well of course not with that tiny screen and boring oldass fisher price looking operating system, lol) or any other Android phone envy.
I do always give Apple credit for one and only one thing though, they do pack the chipset power in their devices, even above and beyond the call of duty. And they dont have too, as Apple tards will obviously buy anything no matter how crappy it is as long as the brand is stamped on the side.
serversurfer - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
1825 is roughly double 914, and 1825 is what the AT&T version of the GS3 scored.