The iPhone 5s Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 17, 2013 9:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone
- iPhone 5S
iPhone Performance Across Generations
Performance improved by a factor of 100x compared to the original iPhone. You can cut that in half if the iPhone could run iOS 4. Needless to say, Apple's CPU performance estimates aren't unreasonable. We've come a long way since the days when ARM11 cores were good enough.
Even compared to a relatively modern phone like the iPhone 4, the jump to a 5s is huge. The gap isn't quite at the level of an order of magnitude, but it's quickly approaching it. Using the single core iPhone 4 under iOS 7 just feels incredibly slow. Starting with the 4S things get a lot better, but I'd say the iPhone 4 is at the point now where it's starting to feel too slow even for normal consumers (at least with iOS 7 installed).
Browsermark 2.0 gives us a good indication of less CPU bound performance gains. Here we see over a 5x increase in performance compared to the original iPhone, and an 83% increase compared to the iPhone 4.
I wanted to have a closer look at raw CPU performance so I turned to Geekbench 3. Unfortunately Geekbench 3 won't run on anything older than iOS 6, so the original iPhone bows out of this test.
Single threaded performance scaled by roughly 9x from the 3GS to the iPhone 5s. The improvement since the iPhone 4/4S days is around 6.5x. Single threaded performance often influences snappiness and UI speed/feel, so it's definitely an important vector to scale across.
Take into account multithreaded performance and the increase over the 3GS is even bigger, almost 17x now.
The only 3D test I could get to reliably run across all of the platforms (outside the original iPhone) was Basemark X. Again I had issues getting Basemark X running in offscreen mode on iOS 7 so all of the tests here are run at each device's native resolution. In the case of the 3GS to 4 transition, that means a performance regression as the 3GS had a much lower display resolution to deal with.
Apple has scaled GPU performance pretty much in line with CPU performance over the years. The 5s scores 15x the frame rate of the iPhone 4, at a higher resolution too.
iPhone 5s vs. Bay Trail
I couldn't help but run Intel's current favorite mobile benchmark on the iPhone 5s. WebXPRT by Principled Technologies is a collection of browser based benchmarks that use HTML5 and js to simulate a number of workloads (photo editing, face detection, stocks dashboard and offline notes).
Granted we're comparing across platforms/browsers here, but the 5s as a platform does extremely well in Intel's favorite benchmark. The 5c by comparison performs a lot more like what we'd expect from a smartphone platform. The iPhone 5s is in a league of its own here. While I don't expect performance equalling the Atom Z3770 across the board, the fact that Apple is getting this close (with two fewer cores at that) is a testament to the work done in Cupertino.
At its launch event Apple claimed the A7 offered desktop class CPU performance. If it really is performance competitive with Bay Trail, I think that statement is a fair one to make. We're not talking about Haswell or even Ivy Bridge levels of desktop performance, but rather something close to mobile Core 2 Duo class. I've broken down the subtests in the table below:
| WebXPRT Performance (time in ms, lower is better) | ||||||
| Chrome/Mobile Safari | Photo Effects | Face Detection | Stocks | Offline Notes | ||
| Apple iPhone 5s (Apple A7 1.3GHz) | 878.9 ms | 1831.4 ms | 436.1 ms | 604.6 ms | ||
| Intel Bay Trail FFRD (Atom Z3770 1.46GHz) | 693.5 ms | 1557.0 ms | 542.9 ms | 737.3 ms | ||
| AMD A4-5000 (1.5GHz) | 411.2 ms | 2349.5 ms | 719.1 ms | 880.7 ms | ||
| Apple iPhone 5c (Apple A6 1.3GHz) | 1987.6 ms | 4119.6 ms | 763.6 ms | 1747.6 ms | ||
It's not a clean sweep for the iPhone 5s, but keep in mind that we are comparing to the best AMD and Intel have to offer in this space. I suspect part of why this is close is because both of those companies have been holding back a bit (there's no rush to build the fastest low margin parts), but it doesn't change reality.
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darkich - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Anand really should be ashamed of himself.. doing the same old Java Script(software dependant to a major extent) trick over and over again, and clearly as a day, refusing to include a hardware benchmark such as GB.That way, he can keep on kissing Intel's and Apple's behind.
(Btw I actually love what Apple is doing with its custom ARM chips, and I am really looking forward to the A7X and iPad 5)
Despicable dishonesty
Dug - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Funny, you want different information than what's provided and some how you come to the conclusion that it's biased. Yet throughout your post you have nothing to back it up, and all you have added is your own personal comments against Apple. Pot calling the kettle black? And from what I can tell from you blabbering on about 64bit code, you have no educated information on iOS 7 64bit or the 64bit proc. Correct me if I am wrong and show me an app that you have developed for it. In the end it comes down to how well the product will perform, and Anand's review has shown that. And what's this comment '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. What 32bit v7 chip are you talking about? And why wouldn't he compare the new chip to the old ones. And what difference does it make?Patranus - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
What difference does it make if the iOS and Android use different JS engines?StevenRN - Saturday, September 21, 2013 - link
By "unbiased" you mean a review from a site like AndroidCentral or similar site?barefeats - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Excellent review. I'm sharing it with every iPhone freak I know.jimbob07734 - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
I'm sure not gonna be that guy that buys the first Samsung 64 bit chip they slap together to match the A7. I doubt they have even started working on it until last week.NerdT - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link
All of these graphics performance comparisions (except the off-screen ones) are incorrect and absolutly miss-leading. The reason is that most of the other phones have a 1080p display which has 2.8x higher resolution that iPhone 5s! That being said, all on-screen scores will get bumped up by about the same scale for iPhone because they are calculated based on FPS only, and the frames are render the the device resolution. This is a wrong benchmarking because you are not having an apple to apple comparision. I would have expected a much higher quality report from Anandtech! Please go ahead and correct your report and prevent miss-leading information.akdj - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
You're simply wrong. We'll leave it at that. This is objective data. You can't argue that. If you're unhappy with the results, build your own benchmarking app. Question---why would it NOT be relevant (on screen tests) when you're using said product? Is there a chance down the road you're going to upgrade your current 4" display to 4.3"? 5"? 6"---720p? 1080p? Easy answer=No. You can't upgrade your display. The onscreen tests are neither 'wrong', 'incorrect' or 'absolutely misleading'. They are numbers derived from current testing suites and software. You can't compare bananas and beans. They're different. So Android has increased the resolution of their displays in some cases??? Who cares! The numbers are STILL accurate. Again, each unique device is of it's own making. If Anand went forward with his site and your reasoning we wouldn't have any type of way to benchmark or gauge performance.jljaynes - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Beast of a chiptredstone - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
i agree. and to think android fans have been criticizing the a7 and the 5s in general. this chip is amazing . wow, what a phone it is