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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FrenchMac - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Hardware is used through the software. Users doesn't only the hardware part of their phone. They use their phone through two filters:the operating system (it must be optimized for the hardware) and the apps (games, video, music, others...)
If one of these two filters is not optimized for the hardware (it could be from a screen resolution standpoint of from a performance standpoint) the user won't get much.
That's the biggest force being the AppStore ecosystem: developers implements new iOS feature in droves to encougare users to stick to their apps. It's a really dynamic market.
Strallus - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Well, Anand left the site, so... other stuff?http://www.anandtech.com/show/8456/the-road-ahead
vgermax - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Anand commented in passing in the iPhone 5s review. The physics portion of 3DMark is multi-threaded and capable of hitting multiple cores, this is where iPhone performance is penalized due to Ax remaining dual-core vs SnapDragon et al. going quad-core.http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-r...
nomster - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
No offence but you look a bit rigged tooSamus - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
LOL. I love how people can't accept the fact Apple can do 'something' right. They're not the most valuable tech company in the world because everything they make is 100% crap.They do get a great deal of shit right. But annoyingly, they get the most simply shit wrong. Like being 2-3 years late in making a phone with a usable on-screen keyboard.
darwinosx - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Apples keyboard is pretty great. Theirs was pretty great when all the Android keyboards were laggy shit which wasn't long ago.Strallus - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Yeah, so ummm, I've used Android phones.I much prefer a keyboard with 0 noticeably latency than a keyboard that has predictive text and something gimicky like swype.
jacure123 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
I concur, at phonearena.com, the battery test were OK for 6 n 6plus. They couldn't beat the s5 and HTC m8, but here the 6 plus is beating the s5 n m8 by 3 hours.lolAndreRichards2010 - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Paranoid Android.darwinosx - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
You are excused for being an idiot .