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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
316 Comments
View All Comments
FrenchMac - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
But for the user to really wins, developer must support the new platform and it's particularity (OpenGL 4.0 in this case). Has there already is a lot of different GPU capacity on Android, developers are having hard time to optimize their games for all the hardware.DJDJPHOTO - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Then maybe the other top benchmark website in the US will help.http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-6-benchmark-res...
Contrary to what android users think, all those really high specs on paper, are still lacking in overall performance.
It's because the operating system is clunky, and all those extra handwaving features and megapixels that 90% of the world will never use actually get in the way of a great user experience.
But, all those Asian companies will sell some phones because they will prey on the ignorant in America. "Our phone has a quad core processor, more is better". Wrong Samsung! They're just cheap Asian knockoffs of the iPhone.
Buy American people, and stop falling for the stupid "the numbers are higher so they must be better" BS. And people say Apple fans are fall for their marketing...geeez
DJDJPHOTO - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
*alldmacfour - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Your comment is way off base.What's American anymore? Apple uses non-American components (this included Samsung) and android was developed by an American company. They assemble the iPhone in China along with just about anything else you're going to buy these days.
mrochester - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
I agree with this. The real suckers are those who fall for specs.shm224 - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
Ok. I just looked at Tom's benchmark briefly and noticed that the first benchmark (display brightness) is very misleading.According to Displaymate, Samsung Galaxy S5 has peak brightness of 696 nit vs Apple iPhone 6's 558 nit. Dr. Soneira remarks that "The Galaxy S5 has the Highest Brightness and Best Contrast Rating for High Ambient Light that we have ever measured."
Now, the S5 has three different display modes (professional, adaptive, cinema) and can be configured to respond to different ambience lights / picture levels at different nits. I'm assuming that these benchmarks are designed to gauge top, peak hardware performance. So why is Tom's G comparing Apple's top nit against the S5's lowest nit figure?
shm224 - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
I'm not going to dissect the rest of Tom's G flawed review and I certainly don't want to flame any fanboi war here -- but if you want to demonstrate that the new wares from Apple are indeed better than Android's, you would have to bring legitimate, well thought-out reviews.Gasaraki88 - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Other site has iPhone6 battery as much lower.http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-...
Mugur - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
My 6" Xperia T2 Ultra Dual has 3000mA and I get 3.5 days of moderate use. And I use it with 2 SIMs. So I think that Sony has something good here...My previous phone was an HTC One M7 and I never got more than 1.5-2 days out of it (2300mA).
twobeer - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Of course it rigged and testcases choosen to highlight the software aspects of iOS rather than try to do real hardware benchmarking. Who do you think pays mr. Anands salary these days :)