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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.
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.
The CB App. What's your 20?
It's like 3D Mark, for iOS?
Something tells me Basemark X doesn't take advantage of any of the Apple specific APIs. We've been seeing a solid ~30-40% increase in FPS when using Metal over the iPhone 5S. Everything else feels about the same though, but then again I haven't had access to our test units for any extended length of time to actually benchmark stuff (they've been kept in a locked up room with no windows chained to an unmovable desk bolted into the floor for the past two weeks). The hardware definitely is faster, but it seems like one of those things that won't matter unless you're targeting iOS specifically and writing Apple proprietary code, so I kinda question how that is going to play out in the future (especially when everyone wants their shit to run on Android and iOS and Blackberry and WinMo all at once).
We already know the gains are less from the keynote. If you look at the graph Apple showed of CPU speed it shows an exponential increase in speed until the 5, but then a noticeable levelling off to the 6.
What they're focussing on now is different. CPU is obviously almost good enough, battery is more important. Instead they're offloading functionality. The motion coprocessor and the GPU. Compare the GPU graph to the CPU one and you see much greater gains.
I though the real race was to be the first company get their phone back up to the size of the analog Motorola bricks with a bonus for a 12" whip antenna.
Basemark X results across all vendors are at http://results.rightware.com/b...
The iPhone 6 is around #17. iPhone 5s, #21.
Of course, everything else in the top 25 is running quad-core CPUs at 2+ GHz.
iPhones? Dual-core at 1.3-1.4 GHz.
That's some crazy math right there.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
There is absolutely no reason to expect a 64 bit architecture to be faster than a 32 bit architecture unless you are doing a lot of 64 bit operations, or need more than 4G of RAM.
Right in theory, wrong in practice. If the only change was the width of the registers then it would make little difference to performance, but both the leading 32-bit architectures also gained more registers and new instructions when moving to a 64-bit architecture. ARM, in particular, made a number of performance-increasing changes to the architecure such as the removal of condition codes from most instructions.
So in practice 64 bit code usually runs faster. But don't take my word for it, look at the benchmarks for A7 running in 32 mode vs 64 bit mode.