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
GPU Performance
While we don't quite have real games to benchmark against, we do have benchmarks that are reasonably good approximations of games, which heavily stress the GPU. For the most part, this means that we can see the performance of the A8's PowerVR GX6450 GPU but there are some aspects that are CPU-bound, which we'll discuss after the results.
Edit: Before I get into the results, I must caution that Basemark X will have inaccurate on-screen results as the benchmark was made using XCode 5.x in order to keep scores comparable between versions 1.1 and 1.1.1. This doesn't affect the overall score, which is solely calculated based upon off-screen performance.
For the most part, we see that the GX6450 is at about the same level as Qualcomm's Adreno 420, which seems to track closely to expectations given that the A7's GPU was around the same performance as the Adreno 330. The 3DMark test does have an interesting result, but it seems that this is because 3DMark's physics test has a strong amount of data dependency that restricts the level of out of order execution that can be done. NVIDIA's Tegra K1 is the current leader in graphics performance, but of course it's also in a tablet instead of a smartphone so it's not a direct competitor.
NAND Performance
As we move towards the goal of seamless performance in everyday tasks, one significant factor is IO performance. While there's definitely a minimum level of performance that allows for generally acceptable smoothness, there's value in having higher storage performance (e.g. prevent bottlenecking in situations such as updating apps in the background). In order to test this, we use Androbench with some custom settings on Android and a custom utility developed by Eric Patno for iOS, who has been quite helpful with furthering our efforts to test storage performance.
As this is the first time that we've looked into NAND performance on iOS devices, it's definitely worth scrutinizing the data a bit more closely than in most cases. There are a few notable cases here, which are the class-leading speeds for sequential reads and writes on the iPhone 6, but also the rather middling random read and write speeds for the iPhone 6 and 5s. The oddest result is definitely the iPhone 5, which is Ryan's personal unit and while the random read speeds are on the low side, random write speeds are easily record-setting.
In practice, with tablets and smartphones being less multitasking heavy than PCs/laptops, the sequential scores are probably slightly more relevant to the overall user experience. The iPhone 6 results show a significant increase in performance over the iPhone 5s in all of the tests, which is always good to see.
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Torakaru - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Which Galaxy did you used? Because I have been reading around that 1GB is not enough and many users complaint about it (doesnt matter if iPhone5/5s/6/6+ or last year iPad's) as for instance the Safary crashes/fully reloads even after more than a couple of tabs in use.Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
"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?"It's a lack of RAM for multitasking. At some point the OS will reach its limit and be forced to evict apps and/or cached Safari tabs. The 5S and 6 have a it a bit worse than the 5 due to the fact that the AArch64 processors in the 5S and 6 require additional RAM to be allocated to the OS to operate the 32bit and 64bit user lands simultaniously.
refineryorker - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
The other interesting thing I noticed about this review and many of the top performing non I phones is that for American consumers, a lot of these phones don't really exist to purchase on the major U.S. carriers.I visited the t mobile, sprint, Att, and Verizon websites and
The Hauwei honor 6, the Samsung Galaxy s5 broadband lte a, Nokia lumia 930, Nokia lumia 630, and the Xperia z1s don't exist on those websites.
The Samsung Galaxy s5 T-Mobile only exists for T-Mobile.
The HTC one e8 is only on sprint.
So all this means is that the List of phones that Americans can purchase looks vastly different than the top performing non iPhones on the above list.
Most non iPhones that Americans can purchase aren't top performers.
roncron - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I've read at least 15 reviews of the iPhone 6, including the excellent review at iLounge.com. But this review is the best of them all. Very thorough and scientific. The review, while long, is also well-written and nicely organized.Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Thank you.cknobman - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I take your battery test results with a grain of salt when it comes to actual real world use. I know they are scientific but it just seems they paint the iPhones as having great battery life when in reality it blows.We have two iPhone 5s in our house, an LG G2, a Nokia Lumia 1520, and a SG4.
In practical use the iPhone's cant even get through 3/4 of a day without being drained dry.
The SG4 can barely make it to evening.
The LG G2 can make an entire day easy but needs to be recharged every day.
The Nokia can go 2 days without being charged.
Before getting the iPhone 5s's I read reviews thinking that those things should get better battery life than the SG4, most of that opinion coming from reviews like yours. Little did I know that those thoughts were bogus.
I dont expect much more practical battery life from and iPhone 6 either. This is not isolated to my house either.
munim - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
It doesn't seem like you're trolling so think about the following factors:I'm assuming different people are using each phone. They probably have different usage habits, different apps syncing, different amount of apps syncing, maybe one person uses the phone more outdoors using higher brightness / GPS / LTE as opposed to wifi.
zhenya00 - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Without some context your comparisons are useless. I presume the phones are owned by different family members and see different usage patterns. Perhaps some of them are backup or work/non-primary phones. Perhaps the iPhones used more heavily than the others as is often the case (I have family members who own iPhones and have work provided Blackberries - I bet they'd say the iPhone has poor battery life as all but which one are they using all day and which one sits on the counter?)You could have bad backups you've restored to them that cause drains, or other problem software. My 5s tended to see about 2.5 hours of 'use' per day, and I'd tend to get about 5 usage hours and 2 days between charges. The 6 seems to be giving me closer to 7-8 hours of use, and again, 2 days of standby.
cknobman - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I cannot give you exact usage patterns for all of the phones.BUT
The iPhone 5s's and the LG G2 are used by my 3 teenagers (two 16, one 14). They all do plenty of facebooking, instagraming, messaging, and tweeting. While non of them have the exact same usage pattern I can safely say that they are all similar. I find it ironic that the two iPhones just happen to be unable to get through a 8 hour period without losing charge. I had to buy both of those phones battery cases for my kids. The LG G2 on the other hand has never had a battery problem.
As for the SG4, that is used by my wife who is a facebook, instagram, and pintrest junky. She can drain a battery on anything in a day. Usually her phone makes it from morning until night but sometimes she kills it before bedtime.
The Nokia is mine and it gets a decent amount of use. During the day not a lot of things going on it while I am at work outside of games when Im in the restroom and during lunch. Once at home it is my primary source of access to anything digital I need. I dont touch a computer once I leave the office.
beggerking@yahoo.com - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I have the same conclusion with mine. Nokia seem to last forever on tiny batteries.