Early iPhone 6 Benchmark Results Show Only Modest Gains For A8

MojoKid writes: Historically speaking, we typically see impressive performance gains each time Apple releases a new custom processor for its mobile products. Certainly that was true of the A7 SoC, the world's first 64-bit smartphone processor. So, can we expect the same kind of performance bump from the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, both of which sport the new custom A8 SoC? Maybe not. The iPhone 6 recently surfaced in results for the Basemark X benchmark and armed with a dual-core 1.4GHz Cyclone CPU and A8 GPU, the iPhone 6 scored 21,204.26 and a earned a place at the top of the chart, though not by much. By comparison, the iPhone 5s scored 20,253.80 in the same benchmark. In other words, the iPhone 6 is currently less than 5 percent faster than the iPhone 5s, at least as far as the Basemark X benchmark is concerned.

Comments

Re:power consumption?

[bennomatic]

Well, I'd suggest the right question is, how much does this one benchmark matter? Fast enough isn't necessarily fast enough, as people will come up with more and more powerful applications.

That said, the primary CPU isn't the only thing that governs speed. My understanding (and I could be totally wrong, but here goes) is that there's a separate and very fast GPU. Apple's done a lot of work with Grand Central Dispatch (is that the right technology?) to help developers offload as much as possible to the GPU, so what looks like a 5% gain on the CPU might in the real world be 10 times that in a performance increase. And at least Apple claims that the 6 is 50% faster than the 5s (again, IIRC), so if they're telling something that's approaching a reasonable truth, it's not just based on CPU, but on other metrics as well.