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 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
That might be a good academic comparison, but doesn't say much about real world performance. I mean you can peg all 8 cores of the latest Exynos in a benchmark, but good luck finding some real world application that does that. There should be an attempt to find some more cross platform tests though, there should be enough apps for both platforms now to make an interesting comparision (Office, Adobe graphics apps, etc).woodsielord - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Is it mandatory to use the word "magic" in an iPhone review? Do you even realize how much it tars an otherwise excellent review? That one word makes me question whether everything else was basically sponsored by Apple. Great review, I just hope it's honest.Alexey291 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
looking at camera quality review I'm having serious doubts about the review being at all honest tbhbeggerking@yahoo.com - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
for every "magic" "best" "awesome" etc mentioned in the Article , Apple gives anandtech $1000its been that way for years now.
victorjr - Thursday, November 5, 2015 - link
This!ben003 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
RE: % Architecture Advantage...
164.gzip 1191 842 ... 9% ???
...
My calculation: (1.4 GHz/ 1.85 GHz) * (1191 / 842) - 1 = +7 %
What's yours ?
ben003 - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
@Joshua / RyanI would define the architecture advantage as the percentage the A9 runs faster at the 1.4 Ghz of the A8 (or the percentage the A8 is slower if driven by the 1.85 Ghz of A9). If you agree on this your numbers are wrong.
Bhairava - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
The best part is when they say "magic", speaking about 3d touch.Really Anandtech, you have lost my respect. I can't believe you stooped so low.
dmacfour - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Yeah, how dare they speak well of a good product.NYU87 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
If this review was for an Android, Fandroids wouldn't have a problem with the author's choice of words. These Fandroids are so salty it's not even funny.