Slashdot Mirror
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.
IIRC, didn't Apple crow about increasing the CPU - RAM bandwidth by a fair bit? That tends to speed up nearly everything. Yeah, they went from LPDDR3 to LPDDR4.
My roommate claims that the iPhone 6s is faster than the iPhone 5c I traded in. The Amazon Kindle app doesn't appear to be running any faster than before. Then again, email, news and text don't require that much speed.
You cherry-picked the first benchmark mentioned, and disregarded the other tests where iPhone 6S out-performed the other phones.
To be fair, the other benchmarks were:
sunspider
and
graphics benchmark, graphics benchmark, graphics benchmark. (Where I'd generally expect the same system winning one really should mean winning all.)
Personally, I don't play games on my phone. So 3dmark etc is irrelevant to me. (But I realize many people do, including my own kids... and the iphone 6s looks like the best phone for games right now; at least in terms of hardware performance.)
The fact that I can't load it up with hundlebundle mobile games, emulators, and so forth still counts against it though.
I try to avoid exposing my kids to freemium ad-ridden crap.
Now the sunspider (javascript) win is more interesting to me, but I'm pretty sure it's just showing that a faster core is faster at single threaded operations, and the A9 is a dual core with 2 faster cores vs Samsung which is octocore but the cores are slower.
That's not particularly interesting by itself; although it does hint at valid question -- is fewer faster cores better or worse than more slower cores a better strategy in a smart phone?
Real world use will answer that... benchmarks not really.
So the upshot... Apple 6s has better graphics performance than a phone released 6 months ago. The new CPU is good... better at single threaded than anything out right now due to faster cores, but it still lags in multithreaded due to only having 2 cores despite them being faster, and I don't know which core strategy ends up being actually better.
How does the battery compare? I was happy with an iphone 3GS years ago, then I was disappointed with my S3 battery, but am quite happy with my current S5. I expect I'd be happy with the battery on an iphone 6s.
And at the end of the day, benchmarks don't matter. Choosing apple vs samsung isn't about benchmarks. Its about ecosystems, and deciding which one you want: apple or android. Myself, I have no intention of ever returning to IOS due to the overly restrictive walls on the garden. But that's just me.