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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
531 Comments
View All Comments
RyanBeta - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
A lot was made of the glass in the run up to this launch but I see no comment about it in the article.I am specifically looking to see if it has changed or information on the materials used over the years. When the original iPhone came out it seemed like they kept with the same glass material through 4s.
As someone who does not use a protective cover and treats my phone well it is frustrating to see the copious amount of minor scratches that have built up on the glass of my 5s in the past year or so. It has probably a hundred or so minor scratches vs the 5 or so scratches I could see on my 4s when I turned it in after 2 years.
ELPCU - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
u kidding me? Yes, RAM has power cost: TINY power cost.That's the worst excuse EVER.
power consumption of RAM is way less than that of display or GPU.
uhuznaa - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Yeah, but when the display is off and the GPU in deep sleep (like when you don't actively use the phone), RAM still needs to be powered and this can become a major part of standby power draw then. I would like to see standby power usage actually tested though. My old iPhone 4 drains about 10% battery per 24h in standby, which certainly helps with having some battery left when you actually start using it during the day.zhenya00 - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Then you haven't done the calculations. If your ram draws even 5mA when idle (probably in the ballpark, but we don't really know - this study from 2010 indicates that the 128MB of mobile ram in the test device used ~1mA, 8x that much certainly uses more https://www.ssrg.nicta.com.au/publications/papers/... then the RAM alone will drain the 1810mAh battery of the iPhone 6 in 15 days. If increasing the RAM to 2GB increases that power consumption just 50% to 7.5mA, you lose 5 days of standby time! If it doubles to 10mA, you lose half your standby life, and now RAM alone will drain the battery in 7.5 days.RAM power consumption is important because it is powered 100% of the time so even tiny increases in power consumption have a large effect on the overall battery life of the device.
ELPCU - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Before reading review, I already started to read comment and it's soo fun to watch everyone arguing whether apple sucks or rocks.TheSlamma - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
it's not fun, it's patheticmjh483 - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Solid review from Anandtech as always. Would you please elaborate on why you aren't willing to use iPhone 6 as your everyday phone?Torakaru - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Hello,I really liked so much your iPhone6 & 6+ reviews, but I found something interesting in your comment nowhere else found and for which I would like to have a deeper knowledge experience sharing from your side. Basically you said:
"The only flaw that the iPhone 6 has is a lack of RAM, and this is only an issue if you also felt it was an issue on the iPhone 5s."
I find it very interesting because I have being reading plenty of reviews of the new iPhone6/6+ and you are the first ones to mention it. I think that you are right, but I have an iPhone4, so I dont know. Could you be so kind to be more precise about that feeling that you have? It is due lack of RAM for multitasking, or also for single tasks?
Thanks a lot in advance guys!!!
Torakaru - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
By the way guys, if any of all of you have the iPhone5/5S or the iPhone6/6+ already and want to share also your experience regarding the possible lack of RAM (noticeable) in your daily use, please comment. Thanks! ;-)dmacfour - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Switched from a Galaxy, didn't notice a thing.