The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Review
by Ryan Smith & Joshua Ho on November 2, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- SoCs
- iPhone 6s
- iPhone 6s Plus
System Performance
One of the more popular and pervasive beliefs in this industry is that specs increasingly don’t matter. In a lot of ways, this review isn’t really the right place to address whether or not this matters, but the short answer is that things like SoC performance matter quite a bit. Outside of the display, the SoC and RF subsystems are one of the biggest power consumers in a phone today and unlike the display or RF systems the CPU and GPU can cause short spikes of enormous power consumption. At this point, we’ve seen SoCs this year that consume anywhere between 6 to over 12 watts when faced with a full load situation. The important part here is that when an SoC uses that much power, it needs to be delivering enough performance to justify the power consumption. In order to test aspects of the phone like the SoC we use our standard suite of benchmarks, which are designed to test various real-world scenarios to get an idea of what peak performance looks like.
In the standard web browser benchmarks, the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are clearly in the lead. The difference in some cases is significant, but given that the benchmarks that we’re running here are all enormous optimization targets it's still a reasonable comparison point. In the interest of trying to avoid optimization targets I decided to look at some new JavaScript benchmarks that aren’t regularly used right now. One interesting benchmark is Ember Performance, which is a JavaScript app framework that is used in a number of popular websites and applications. This isn’t as popular as AngularJS at the moment, but in the absence of a good mobile benchmark EmberJS should be a reasonably good proxy.
In this benchmark, we can see that there’s a pretty enormous performance uplift that results when you compare the iPhone 6s' to anything else out there on the market. Weirdly enough, on average it looks like Samsung’s S-Browser ends up slower here than Chrome, but it’s likely that this is just because S-Browser is using an older build of Chromium which negates the advantages of platform-specific optimizations that Samsung is integrating into S-Browser.
Looking at Basemark OS II, once again Apple is basically taking the lead across the board. The differences aren’t necessarily as enormous as they are in single-threaded browser benchmarks, but the iPhone 6s’ retain a significant overall performance lead over the next best mobile devices.
Overall, in benchmarks where CPU performance is a significant influence the iPhone 6s is pretty much at the very top of the stack. Of course, Apple has also had about 6-8 months of time since the launch of SoCs like the Snapdragon 810 and Exynos 7420 so this is at least partially to be expected. The real surprise and/or disappointment would be if future Exynos and Snapdragon SoCs continue to lag behind the A9 in CPU performance.
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blackcrayon - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
I bet it goes further than you think. I bet Anandtech is paying Huawei and Samsung or maybe has undercover agents at Qualcomm to make sure their SOCs perform more slowly than Apple's. It's the only way to explain it!You're so enraged and deluded that you can't see how something that is pretty much universally agreed as "one of the best" could possible be "the best" in someone's opinion (an opinion backed up by a uniquely large amount of test data I should add).
osxandwindows - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
You and your conspiracy theories.lol
So what other conspiracy theories do you have about anandtech
blackcrayon - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Maybe Apple injected code into Webkit (that's also in Chrome and that Microsoft and Mozilla also copied unbeknownst to them) that makes any bar graph showing iPhone performance to have longer lines! Except when smaller lines are better, then it makes them shorter. :)melgross - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Maybe because it actually is the best, despite what Android users want to think.zeeBomb - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
the fight between android and apple will never end.itpromike - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Paid? That is a very dangerous and very serious accusation for a publication such as Anandtech which does scientific and objective chip architectural analysis as well as benchmarks and performance measurements. You are suggesting that Apple is literally giving them money to lie to all of their readers and to willingly change benchmark results AND architectural analysis, including forging SOC cross section pictures (also implicating chip works of being equally fraudulent and deceitful)? You are truly saying that Apple is paying Anandtech to publish falsified results, with Anandtech having no integrity at all? WOW. That is a BOLD BOLD claim. I'd love to see your journalistic proof of this. Do you have links to bank statements, written contracts, emails, phone conversation recordings, etc... that we all can look at so we can make sure the public is aware that Anandtech writers, and analysts are liars? Or can you share with us your deep examination and analysis of the page by page writings and findings in the review in contrast to your on findings that you've spent hours on end testing and analyzing? This way none of their readers will mistake them for being an honest, data driven publication. Just go ahead and link to your findings in the reply to this message. ThanksAlexey291 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Er are you sure you're not confusing anandtech from half a dozen years ago with a marketing publication with the same name in the now?shadowii - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Wow, what a worthless reply. Read the article.KoolAidMan1 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Anandtech backed up their conclusion with pages and pages of objective tests and analysis. This bothers you so you accuse them of being paid shills.Standard Fandroid in the wild, ladies and gentlemen.
Ethos Evoss - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Yeah and final words section like wtitting a bokk !!! Fkin never seen end so long like this..The whole review - aplle bible.. anandtech had to follow apples bible......