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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frickingphil - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Scaling these days seems to be pretty negligible in terms of performance; all digital monitors and TV's do scaling whenever your input resolution doesn't match the native display of the panel.It's a lot less work to render at a lower resolution and upscale to native vs. the other way around.
kirito - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Now, apple haters gonna hate again with this results. This would shut them off for a while. Waiting for the full review.vFunct - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Could use a comparison with the iPad for resolution effects.RickC - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
And no Windows phones? no Lumia 1520, 925, 830? Talk market share all you want, these are valid competitors and aren't going away.vFunct - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
No, no they're not valid competitors.Windows phones do not matter in the least. They are insignificant in every way.
They are largely useless because of their terrible design and slow responsiveness.
log0n - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Ok you have obviously never actually used a WP8/8.1 device. The speed difference alone was enough to make me give up on my Nexus 5 after 3 months & go back to my Lumia 920. It was much faster to load & use apps in general not to mention the complete & utter lack of any OS stuttering which I was connately hounded by on the Nexus 5 no matter what I did (enable ART, Cyanogen, AOSP).The consensus is Lumia's have the BEST cameras in a phone out there. They also happen to have the best Navigation suite (HERE Maps, Nav+, etc.) with the most accurate & up to date maps & in my experience the best usability (live tiles, Glance Screen), the best outdoor readability & Incredible build quality (Go youtube Lumia 920 Hammer Test).
darwiniandude - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Lumia's are great phones.They are fast, like iOS, unlike Android.
The cameras take awesome pictures.
The shot to shot time, focus speed, burst speed, are appallingly slow compared to even the iPhone 5s. This may or may not matter depending on what you take photos of. But with a Lumia you may miss the shot. (Eg the Bee flys from the flower before you can get a second shot in)
Also, low light performance at Night time is quite terrible on some models.
darwiniandude - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
I would also like to see them in these tests. Is GFXbench, Geekbench, 3D Mark etc available on Windows Phone? (Not sure, just asking)tuxRoller - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Is there a video you can point me to that will prove your point? My experience is that win8 performs very similarly to android on the n5 (in particular). The input latency tests I've seen also tell the story that win8 and android have similar results.log0n - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
No I don't have any videos to point to but just go to a store & try one for your self you'll see the speed difference (at least compared to the Nexus 5 class hardware)