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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Toss3 - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
The browser benchmarks would make more sense if they used the stock browser on all the devices, not just on the iPhone to make it look good. The Note 4 for instance is scoring around 350ms with its own browser, while on Chrome it is only seeing 800ms. The results should also be in a separate "Web-browsing performance" section instead of the CPU performance one.thackr - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Does anyone else see the green dot lens flare shown here on their iPhone 6? http://www.alternapop.com/2014/10/02/iphone-6-lens...The0ne - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
"At this point, it’s not really possible to revolutionize the smartphone..."Stopped when I got here. I don't usually cuss but you have got to be shtting me for making such a statement. In your effort to try to write a unbiased review you are already stating that for whatever the reasons the phone may lack it is because nothing can be improve so it's a great phone. I officially hate all your Apple reviews now. This is sickening for any professional engineer to digest.
JC86 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
@TheOne: Engineers are constantly tweaking and refining the software and hardware for a better UX and that refinement is great but the bottom line is the modern smartphone as we know it have not had any revolutionary advancements in years. It's a mature product category, plain and simple.tralalalalalala40 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
So you're one of those that thinks cars are changing massively every year. "THE BRAND NEW REVOLUTION IS HERE FOR A LIMITED TIME"sgmuser - Sunday, October 12, 2014 - link
"and how Apple’s SoC development is now synchronized with the very edge of semiconductor fabrication technology." You are not kidding right! :-) Comparing Intel's 14nm chips, I still believe Mobile phone SoCs are not coping up with the latest tech. m2c. Samsung (with Exynos) atleast jumped a bit...comparing QC SD or Apple Ax series.Pandian - Sunday, October 12, 2014 - link
Actually, Intel is not in making chips, 14nm or 20nm, for cell phones at large! Such a big company with capacity to supply designer boards to any manufacturer in the handheld 3inch or 12 inch device - and still staying away!Pandian - Sunday, October 12, 2014 - link
Compare these - Apple, etc. and All Pharma! 2-5% on actual R&D by pharmaceutical companies, (esp., the ones pricing cancer and Hepatitis C drugs) and about 95 % on marketing (read bribing the Medical industry - that includes "respectable life-saving Doctors") - vs 20-50% profit by tech companies (Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, HP, etc.) on products made from R&D from this decade! Without the slave labor of China and such countries, even that profit is not possible! Today's pyramids and Taj Mahals!Drugs: Most of these drugs were "discovered" decades ago in govt. research facilities - somehow, they are private intellectual properties today! Even anti-helminths (drugs for cattle parasites) costing ~$1-10 for 1000 pills, suddenly cost up to thousands of dollars each pill, because their anti-cancer capacities were "discovered" as side-effects! Even aspirin, made in third world countries and sold here, costs about ten times from a decade or so ago, due to price fixing!
Your life or $200,000 - pay-up or die, if you have cancer or Hepatitis C.
The target is larger with cellphones and computers - hence the bigger market value of the companies!
Even within the tech industry, the profit of $200-300 for each device is paid once every three years or so - the cost of gasoline for a car is more than that in 2-3 months! The actual leaches that cost the consumer are the cell and cable/satellite companies - thousands of dollars a family in a two year contract! USA still charges the highest fee for cell plans, voice, text and data - taking a bite at each end of the link, i.e., the caller and the recipient!
And, we whine more about the cost of these hand-held toys - that is the purpose and use of most of these "smart" devices! Truly important communication via voice, or the equivalent of the Morse code or ham-radio, is so small - not worth taking care of while driving a 4000+lb missile at 55 to 80 mph!
Both Apple and Samsung will take a dive in the next 12 months
A millionaire on CNBC talked about not being eligible for a phone upgrade for another year - and therefore not having hands-on experience with the recently released phones, Apple, HTC, etc.! That is how you stay rich!
The post seems irrelevant! No! The basic premise of most of the posts here are about MONEY!
xmen77 - Monday, October 13, 2014 - link
There can not be "ideal 6500k" if the other LCD in this all badalso
phonearena.com/reviews/Screen-comparison-iPhone-6-vs-Galaxy-S5-vs-G3-vs-One-M8-vs-iPhone-5s_id3810
this is "ideal 6500k"?
thrasher32 - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
Yeah I'm just gonna say it: Apple is the Bose of mobile electronics, only those who don't know any better buy that junk. Hey it's your money feel free to waste as much as you like.