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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
531 Comments
View All Comments
iSeptimus - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
The display is far better to use on the iPhone. I have just sold my S6 Edge and gone back to the 6S+ and so much happier with the screen, even at a "lowly" 1080P. Colour reproduction, viewing angle etc are so much better.MattL - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Displaymate has yet to review the 6S+ screen (though I'm sure it will be coming in the next few days), but the last couple generations of Samsung phones handily beat the iPhones in those areas.Color reproduction is probably due to you not setting the screen mode to "Basic"... the default Samsung mode is above the sRGB gamut which gives inaccurate colors (keep in mind Samsung actually has a screen mode that supports adobe RGB so being able to go above sRGB color gamut is actually useful), in that mode the last couple generations on displaymate have achieved better color accuracy than their iPhone counterparts and I'd expect that to be the same this generation (though in fairness both are getting very color accurate that they both are excellent).
Viewing angles, that I find hard to believe, LCDs show a far higher decrease in brightness and contrast at angles compared to the AMOLED screens... The only advantage is sometimes color accuracy at angles for LCD screen, but that's heavily downgraded by the previous factors.
FL777 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
The color reproduction of the S6 and the iPhone 6 are neck and neck according to objective reviews - and the Samsung S6 is rated superior to the iPhone display in most categories. Read Displaymate's reviews of both phones and Displaymate is the best in the business.Oh and BTW, many of the Samsung S6 owners I have talked to switched from the iPhone 6. So there are a lot of people who disagree with you.
zeeBomb - Sunday, November 8, 2015 - link
True.KPOM - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
3D Touch works just fine.FL777 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Sorry for all of the spelling errors in my last post, I was in a hurry. Also, there doesn't seem to be an edit function.brruno - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
@AnandtechCan you guys run geekbench a few consecutive times to see how much the performance drops ?
ciderrules - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Yes, and do it on Samsung phones as well so we can see how much further behind they get after multiple runs.Gatto - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Great, great review.The best technical review of the web.
id4andrei - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
"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."Just for the sake of separation, the previous web benchmarks were single threaded? Why not introduce this categorization in future reviews. Single and multi-threaded benchmarks/performance - two wide sections.