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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blackcrayon - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
There's also a big difference (heh) between being able to discern a difference, or caring about the difference. I certainly care about the difference between an iPad 2 screen and an iPad 3 and up screen. But I care *far* less about a 326 ppi screen vs a 400 ppi one. The other aspects of the display at that point are more "careworthy" (viewing angles, color, contrast, etc).techconc - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Assuming 20/20 vision, 326ppi is "retina" quality at a distance of 10.5" or greater. 400ppi brings that in to 8.5" or greater. This can be mathematically proven. For you to claim to be able to discern the difference, you either have vision that is greater than 20/20 or you hold your phone much closer than everyone else in normal use. I'm guessing that neither is true and that you're more concerned about the values listed on a spec sheet.Revdarian - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
You know prior to disregarding his claims you should investigate human eyesight further, i present to you the phenomenom of Hyper Acuity, which is simply that our brains actually do notice certain defects up to 10x smaller than our "hardware" in our eyes suggests that we should be able to notice.techconc - Monday, October 6, 2014 - link
@Revdarian - Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of Hyper Acuity. However, if the argument comes down to "I think there's a difference between these two displays, but I can't really say what it is..." then I think it's also safe to suggest that any such differences simply don't matter. From a practical perspective, today's high end screens (including the iPhone 6 and 6+) have reached the point where any further "improvement" in resolution adds little or no value for normal viewing distances. That said, there are still improvements to be made in terms of color accuracy, brightness, contrast, etc. which are far more noticeable. As such, it's probably not a coincidence that these are the type of improvements that Apple has targeted with their latest displays.Kidster3001 - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
I agree. I am ready for an Android upgrade but all the top models have stupid mega resolution. I don't want to pay for it because it provides no benefit. Can't see it, eats more battery.bernstein - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
at least you got one thing right: apple is after the polish not features (with consumers willing to pay huge money for that)mrochester - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
And I wish there were more manufactures who would take this approach. It's a lonely, if extremely lucrative, market for Apple.dmacfour - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
After using an Android for 2 years, I came to the realization that polish, fit and finish, and UI fluidity are important to me.Zakster - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
You need weed !mrubin63 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Dude, please consider not skipping your meds!! I hope Apple sues you into the 20th Century. You are so clueless to be not just bizarre, but a bit unhinged mentally.