iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus: Preliminary Results
by Joshua Ho on September 22, 2014 7:07 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iOS
- iPhone 6
- iPhone 6 Plus
While we’re still working on the full review, I want to get out some preliminary results for the iPhone 6. For now, this means some basic performance data and battery life, which include browser benchmarks, game-type benchmarks, and our standard web browsing battery life test. There’s definitely a lot more to talk about for this phone, but this should give an idea of what to expect in the full review. To start, we'll look at the browser benchmarks, which can serve as a relatively useful proxy for CPU performance.
There are a few interesting observations here, as a great deal of the scaling is above what one would expect from the minor frequency bump when comparing A7 and A8. In SunSpider, we see about a 13% increase in performance that can't be explained by frequency increases alone. For Kraken, this change is around 7.5%, and we see a similar trend across the board for the rest of these tests. This points towards a relatively similar underlying architecture, although it's still too early to tell how much changes between the A7 and A8 CPU architectures. Next, we'll look at GPU performance in 3DMark and GFXBench, although we're still working on figuring out the exact GPU in A8.
In in GPU benchmarks, we generally see a pretty solid lead over the competition for the iPhone 6/A8. It's seems quite clear that there is a significant impact to GPU performance in the iPhone 6 Plus due to the 2208x1242 resolution that all content is rendered at. It seems that this is necessary though, as the rendering system for iOS cannot easily adapt to arbitrary resolutions and display sizes. Before we wrap up this article though, I definitely need to address battery life. As with all of our battery life tests, we standardize on 200 nits and ensure that our workload in the web browsing test has a reasonable amount of time in all power states of an SoC.
As one can see, it seems that Apple has managed to do something quite incredible with battery life. Normally an 1810 mAh battery with 3.82V nominal voltage would be quite a poor performer, but the iPhone 6 is a step above just about every other Android smartphone on the market. The iPhone 6 Plus also has a strong showing, although not quite delivering outrageous levels of battery life the way the Ascend Mate 2 does. That's it for now, but the full review should be coming in the near future.
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danbi - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Or, as they say 'All the steam went to the whistle'.centhar - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
"Another example with cars, you could have two cars with exactly the same specs and weight. But one is 4 wheel drive and one is 2 wheel drive. The 2 wheel drive version will be faster, because of higher efficiency in the delivery of power."Not relevant to the discussion, but I can't let you slip this by. :P Two cars with the same HP at the crank, the 4wd will be faster because of the available traction at all 4 wheels. Ask anyone with a STi or an EVO.
Booty - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
I realize as a Windows Phone user I'm in the minority, but it would still be nice to see a device from the Lumia line in these tables for reference.Brandon Chester - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
You can check out the bench section of the site for data about more devices.Narg - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
I'd say battery life is OK, but not stellar. If they'd not been so keen on thin, and just bumped up the thickness to match the camera bulge and put in a bigger battery, I think we would have seen super stellar battery. Then the iPhone would be a MUST have. I calculate 3 weeks standby on the 6 Plus. WOW!tehdef - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Rather have thinner than a battery that may last me 1.5 days instead of 1. I'm going to charge it at the end of the day either way. It honestly doesn't matter as long as it lasts the day of heavy use, which it is confirmed to be doing as long as you aren't blasting it with Bioshock for 4 hours straight.Marcos Stein - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Iphone 6 Plus Gfxbench is different from http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-6-benchmark-res...Gfxbench website is down. Maybe updating?
kron123456789 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
gfxbench.com is working now. Did you notice that both iPhone 6 and 6+ are using iPhone 5's resolution(1136x640) in Onscreen tests? That's why they have over 30fps in Manhattan Onscreen and 18-19fps in Manhattan 1080p Offscreen.GC2:CS - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
The app probably hasn't been updated to the new resolution yet.30 fps is still great considering the GPU is trying to upscale that from 640p.
kron123456789 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
It is definetely not updated to the new resolution. But, anandtech's results seems pretty valid.