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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Lucian Armasu - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
That's irrelevant. Sunspider is single threaded.Toss3 - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
International Galaxy S3 here and I'm scoring 1200ms without any tweaks. Comparing the phones with their current FW would be no more than fair.mjaniec - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
A pretty old Google Samsung Galaxy Nexus gets 1848.8 ms with Jelly Bean and Chrome...Yes, iPhone 5 is faster in this benchmark.
But the difference is significantly less than presented in this article.
I wonder what the "real" benchmark result for G3 is...
Evollution - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Maybe you next time post the OS that you tested this .. GS3 with 4.0 or 4.1 ?!+ can you test the GS3 with Firefox or Chrome so maybe all the IOS fanboys shout up ?!
tipoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
1000ms in Sunspider makes it the fastest smartphone shipping today at that test, and 1400-1600 in Geekbench is very very respectable. I expect they'll hold the CPU performance crown for months (I forget when quad core Krait is coming out, plus true A15 designs), and the GPU performance crown possibly all the way to the next iPhone which will again claim it.tipoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
I think 1000ms is even faster than a Pentium 4 3GHz running a full desktop browser.lowlymarine - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
I happen to have a Pentium M 750 (Single-core Dothan @ 1.86 GHz) right here, and it still demolishes the A6+iOS6 Safari combo in Sunspider, turning in a score just under 500ms running Chrome 21 on Xubuntu 12.04. Performance of the Pentium M 750 should be roughly comparable to that of the Pentium 4 630, according to Anandtech's own benchmarks: http://www.anandtech.com/show/1399/8Boy, that was a long time ago.
tipoo - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
You're right, I underestimated, my parents have a 2.9GHz P4 running XP and Chrome 21 got 700.lowlymarine - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
>"I forget when quad core Krait is coming out""This week," it would appear: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6300/lg-makes-optimu...
Then again Sunspider is essentially single-threaded so don't look for quad-core Krait to improve performance any over dual-core in that particular benchmark.
krumme - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
"SunSpider JavaScript is only useful for those reviews wereAtom based phones are to be promoted as "the fastest in the world".... and now
Apple did spoil that as well"
Hans de Vries
http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1686...