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iPhone 6s's A9 Processor Racks Up Impressive Benchmarks
MojoKid writes: Underneath the hood of Apple's new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus models is a new custom designed System-on-Chip (SoC) that Apple has dubbed its A9 processor. It's a 64-bit chip that, according to Apple, is the most advanced ever built for any smartphone, and that's just one of many claims coming out of Cupertino. Apple is also claiming a level of gaming performance on par with dedicated game consoles and with a graphics engine that's 90 percent faster than the previous generation. For compute chores, Apple says the A9 chip improves overall CPU performance by up to 70 percent. These performance promises come without divulging too much about the physical makeup of the A9, though in testing its dual-core SoC does seem to compete well with the likes of Samsung's octal-core Exynos chips found in the Galaxy S6 line. Further, in intial graphics benchmark testing, the A9 also leads the pack in mosts tests, sometimes by a healthy margin, even besting Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 in tests like 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited.
>In Geekbench, the iPhone 6s Plus performed second only to Samsung's newest Galaxy models
So it came in second! Yay!
I'm not sure where you got your figures (since there is no citation, Yay!); but this article claims that the iPhone 6s "Obliterates" the competition. And the GeekBench 3 scores in that article would tend to support that claim.
Was this before or after the carrier bloatware was added?
Um, in case you didn't know, on the iPhone, the Carriers aren't allowed to add ANY bloatware whatsoever.
IIRC, didn't Apple crow about increasing the CPU - RAM bandwidth by a fair bit?
There's a great article covering just that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
>In Geekbench, the iPhone 6s Plus performed second only to Samsung's newest Galaxy models
So it came in second! Yay!
I'm not sure where you got your figures (since there is no citation, Yay!); but this article claims that the iPhone 6s "Obliterates" the competition. And the GeekBench 3 scores in that article would tend to support that claim.
I got my figures from the article. I see a headline proclaiming product A to be the best and I scroll down and the first figures I find are of product B being better.
4996, 4952, 4824 and 4799 are all bigger numbers than 4379, yet they put the 4379 first in the chart, whereas all the other entries in that chart are ranked by geekbench score. This was not an objective exposition of the data. Tufte would been spinning in his grave if he was dead.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I'm struggling to understand how apple get away with not announcing any info about the codes, the cache size, memory bandwidth etc. Surely on a mobile device with limited power, optimisation of applications is a priority. How do people manage this without any idea of the physical architecture of the machine they are developing for?
Maybe i'm just old school, but knowing what hardware you are targeting is almost the first bit of info which informs an efficient use of the resources available.
Ah, you must be nearly as old as I!
Nowadays, that stuff is almost always left up to the Optimization "pass" of the Compiler. These young whippersnappers wouldn't know how to code tightly in Assembly if their life depended on it.
And have you ever coded in ARM Assembler?!? Talk about an instruction set that is optimized for Compilers, not humans!!! I did do some stuff in ARMv7 Assembly; but I wouldn't have enjoyed coding a bunch of stuff in it (and I LOVE coding in Assembly Language!).
And as far as "efficient use of resources" goes: Again, that is largely a consideration of the past. These systems have SOOOOO much available, well, everything that, in a lot of use-cases, you can just code as if the sky's the limit. Because it usually is...
The single-core figure is listed in first place because it's the most relevant predictor of phone performance. Very few applications are written to be parallel--they're mostly games with physics simulations and the like. Even then, you have to remember that Samsung packs 8 cores into those phones and the A9 only has two and is clocked lower. That means that not only is the A9 more efficient per tick, it's also significantly more efficient per core. That means better output for less power draw.
So yes, the multi-core scores are lower, there's no doubt. The only thing that means is that in that one artificial benchmark, the bar is shorter for the A9 than for the other phones. In nearly every other benchmark--and most importantly, in benchmarks meant to simulate real-world situations--it outperforms the other CPUs by a wide margin.
1. Javascript benchmarks are a real-world test, since these phones are constantly executing javascript when you use the browser. What you say is true, though--Apple has an advantage because it has both the best processor and best engine for executing javascript, so it's not showing exactly how powerful the CPU is. But that's what the synthetic benchmark is for.
2. The display on the iPhone isn't 'low res', it's just a lower resolution than the one on other phones. But that's a relevant trade-off, because it means that Apple can push those pixels faster, for less battery cost than other phones. It's a calculated trade-off, because nearly nobody can tell the difference. The games on the iPhone will look just as good or better. Don't blame Apple for not throwing pixels at a problem that doesn't exist.
If you go into settings and turn on "Reduce Motion" it will get rid of all the annoying animations and the phone will feel twice as fast. I have no idea why Apple won't let the stupid transitions go.