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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Drasca - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Less workload = longer charge.Since we don't know the actual workload your teenagers are inconclusive. Given literal different Apple to Win Phone app economy systems, the usage model is further blurred. For all we know, your teenagers could be using the iphone more / intensively, but no conclusion can be drawn.
Personally, I think all your family should be spending less time on the phone, but that's me.
cknobman - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
No doubt they should be on the phone less and I try my damnedest to get them off.My wife is the problem and unfortunately that is a battle I wont win. Since I dont wont a divorce I have to make concessions somewhere.
If it were up to me my kids would not even have smartphones. Right the farthest I can go is to take them away when they are making poor grades and/or get in trouble.
Parhel - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I couldn't exactly tell from your comment if you have the 5 or the 5s. If you have the 5, though, check if your phone is part of the battery recall. Mine was, and after the replacement, the difference was night and day.cupholder - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
I have a Note 3 that would last between 10 and 48 hours on a single charge. Yes, android is that annoyingly variable in that regard. The higher numbers tended to occur once I got AutoStarts and Greenify(rooted).With the iPhone 6+, I'm getting 36+ hours. I haven't done a full rundown outside of the first day, but I was actively trying to kill it to properly calibrate the battery for the first use. It was at 36 hours of use with 14 hours of "Usage" time. No idea how much of that was screen time. With the Note, I never got more than 6-7 hours of screen time.
Note during a day of work: Come home ~30-40%.
iPhone 6+ during a day of work: Come home ~70-85%.
This includes an hour break of constant screen on time and YouTube/Crunchyroll/Netflix viewing during that hour.
So, no, the battery life on this phone IS awesome.
dmacfour - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Why do you think the performance of the previous generation is indicative of the performance of the 6+?Stimpak_Addict - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
I got an iPhone 6, and I can attest that the display is very impressive.One thing that does bother me is the scaled apps that have not been optimized for iPhone 6's larger display. Mainly the fact that it makes the size of the keyboard inconsistent with apps that have been optimized for the larger screen. Of course, this will be fixed in time as developers update their apps.
beggerking@yahoo.com - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
i don't know why you would attest a 720p screen as being "impressive"...imo iphone 6+ screen is much better.
ufarooq - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Hey guys...how did you estimated SPECINT2000 score? Did you run these workloads?Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Yes. We have built a version of SPECint2000 to run on iOS. These are estimated scores because SPEC CPU2000 is retired, which means further scores cannot be submitted as official.SunnyNW - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Interesting Apple has been able to consistently deliver a die shrink (whether half-node or full-node) each year and if Samsung delivers like promised I guess can continue that next year with the A9 but I wonder if that will be the end of the year over year improvement...