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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akdj - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
You should read 'long pages' like the "Final Words" section more often. Help on your spelling as well as getting your ...a point acrosstuxRoller - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Read the review.I'm not an apple "fan", but it's clear they have, BY FAR, the best hardware in a phone that you can buy (storage, battery, cpu, memory, gpu).
While it's true this was an off year for android soc (thanks Qualcomm), that even highlights all the more the massive improvement this phone is over last year's.
Caliko - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Apple is notorious for NOT sharing a penny for media/reviews/placements.You just sound silly to those in the know. Almost funny.
Bfree4me - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
@djsvetljo Kudos to Anand tech for another very thorough review done on the venerable iPhone, but I think that you may have a point. After reading this review, I went back and looked at the Galaxy NOTE 5/Edge review published 4 weeks ago and could not for the life of me find a similar exhaustive analysis of the Octa Core ® CPU that the Korean maker deploys. No pictures of the SOC or GPU. But hey, they are not obligated to so either. But good points nonetheless.jospoortvliet - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
That SOC/core was extensively reviewed in earlier articles and a known quantity...NYU87 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
You didn't even read the review? Jesus Fandroids are more retarded than I thought.Infy2 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
While iPhone 6s may be full of engineering triumphs and technological marvels, apart from 3D Touch, I don't believe it will make much difference in normal day-to-day use compared to older iPhones.NEDM64 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Exactly. Hence the name: iPhone 6S (S for speed, not 7), and the ZERO exterior design changes.It's a phone you buy when you buy new.
ASEdouardD - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
For the 6s, I don't feel it changes much of anything. The 6 Plus though had some trouble having smooth animations across the board with transparency on (Apple annoys me with their obsession with non necessary transparency effects that slow down phones and laptops for no good reasons). With the 6s Plus everything is smooth and snappy.CBone - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
What good is all this power when everything runs and looks the same at the same resolution? I would have liked actual measues of real differences. 52 seconds to install vs 30 seconds on the 6s, 12 seconds to edit convert and transfer vs 13 on the 6s, etc. We already know that the usual benchmarks and SoC specs will be heavily in favor of the new phone but the actual use is nearly the exact same experience aside from hardware enabled changes like camera hardware changes and 3d touch and artificial differentiation like live photos and siri. It would be nice to explore a little further than canned benches for those aspects.