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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DERSS - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Test on Phone Arena is crooked: the faster your phone, the faster it burns battery in their test.ninjaroll - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Jesus, I just went to PhoneArena out of curiosity, and can say I won't be going there ever again. Nothing but cry babies in the comments.lilo777 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Comment sections on PhoneArena are horrible but the site does publish a lot of mobile-related news (probably more than any other site)shm224 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Can anyone explain to me why SunSpider "a relatively useful proxy for CPU performance"?shm224 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Seems like those benchmarks gauge browser performance, not CPU.Microsoft for instance claims IE11 (139) performs better than Firefox 25 (205), Chrome 30 (195), Opera (188) on a Dell Optiplex with a 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo Intel processor, 4GB RAM, Intel Integrated Video. That's about 40% difference in performance.
I also just ran Octane test on my rMacbook Pro (mid 2012) -- Chrome 37 (24530) outperforms Safari (20853), Firefox (20718) by about 20%.
lilo777 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Probably because this test performs CPU intensive operations but there are many caveats. As I understand, operations in this test can't be multi-threaded (hence CPUs with smaller number of large cores do better in it). Secondly it is very browser dependent so the same CPU (phone) can produce vastly different results using different browsers. Because of that it is mostly useful in just two scenarios:* running the same browser on two different Android phones
* running the same browser (same iOS version) on two different iPhones
Cross-platform comparisons are not very useful (at least not as CPU comparisons)
shm224 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Sure, I can see that it'd be useful look at it within one product line/browser, but, as you indicated, it seems nonsensical to use this composite "web/javascript benchmarks" to gauge "CPU performance."I just did a quick test of my own on my rMacBook 15" (mid-2012, 2.3Ghz Core i7)
Octane SunSpider 1.0.2 Kraken 1.1
Safari 8 20853 189.1 2176.3
Firefox 32 20718 195.2 1156
Chrome 37 24530 190.3 1515.4
delta(min,max) % 18.40 3.23 88.26
So they are obviously not browser neutral, even within one same platform, so apparently they are not just measuring "CPU intensive operations." It's one thing to say the iPhone 6's browser or javascript engine is faster, but to say the A8 is faster than those used by competitors is laughable.
blackcrayon - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Well, your sunspider scores seem to be pretty consistent...shm224 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Sure, my limited sampling is by no means representative, but according to Microsoft's recent announcement, IE 11 (139) outperforms Firefox 25 (205), Chrome 30 (195), Opera (188) on a Dell Optiplex with a 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo Intel processor, 4GB RAM, Intel Integrated Video in SunSpider scores. That's about 30% difference in SunSpider performance.So these benchmarks are highly dependent on webbrowser/javascript engine implementation (duh!) -- and they make no false pretense about measuring CPU performance as AnandTech does here.
ams23 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Hey Josh, a forum member noticed that the 3DMark Unlimited "Physics" graph appears to be off for the NVIDIA Shield Tablet (it appears to be using the Shield Portable data point instead): http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=3673681...On a side note, have you taken a look at the actual gfxbench website for data on iPhone 6 and 6 Plus? It appears that these phones are consistently rendering at the lower iPhone 5S resolution of 1136x640 in the T-Rex and Manhattan On-screen tests (and most other reviews reported those numbers too): http://gfxbench.com/compare.jsp?benchmark=gfx30&am...