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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.
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.
You cherry-picked the first benchmark mentioned, and disregarded the other tests where iPhone 6S out-performed the other phones.
>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.
Now, if only their UI designers would get some sense in their heads and kill this white and harsh blue, ultra skinny fonts, overly animated everything and go back AT LEAST A LITTLE to the iOS 5 and iOS 6 realism.
That UI was SO much easier to understand and less visually hideous to look at.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
You're Holding the Geekbench Wrong
Only because Satan likes iPhones. We all know that iPhones are the work of the Devil, and that hellfire awaits those who buy iPhones. Throw yours away, brother. Don't be sucked into the Devil's evil plot! Buy Android, the smartphone for the Righteous!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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
To the 3party developer house that made this for apple.. congrats.. I know there must be a 3rd party entity somewhere.. Because the product seems to work..
Sorry. Apple did the R&D on this themselves.
I also find it interesting how those surface with the "shiny look in their eyes" Ohh New Apple product "pretty, pretty, pretty" without truly understanding the premise of what they are getting into..
What in the Hell are you even blathering-on about? is your Apple Hatred so strong that you can't speak; or are you just incapable of composing a sentence?
Much like the Lisa, the Newton, and the i-ball, this too will pass. "like a wet fart in an elevator"
The Lisa was a wonderfully-engineered machine, built (and priced) for business; with an integrated Office suite, Suspend/Resume for all open Applications and Documents, the first consumer-ready GUI, and much more; the Newton was a game-changer; but suffered from bad management at Apple at the time; WTF is the "i-ball"?
Congrats Apple on your new adventures..
I also find it funny that up-untill recently, Samsung made the apple chips.. Now that they are out of the loop.. lets see what happens..
thanks
Samsung NEVER Designed Apple's CPUs; they were (and are now again) Apple's "Fab House" for CPUs. BIG Difference.
TSMC was briefly the Fab House for the A8 SoC; but Apple went back to Samsung after that experiment. Actually, I think that Samsung was even listed as a "Second Source" Fab for the A8, and I'll bet that TSMC is listed as the "Second Source" on the A9.
Such is the way when it comes to custom IC manufacturing.
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...
I have a private office with real walls and a door. Nobody sits next to me.
There's a guy down the hall with a private office with real walls and a door. We can all tell when he's on a call using his speakerphone because we hear him all the way down the hall.
It would bother me less if they just put it on speaker.
And it would bother more people even less if they heard neither side of the call.
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.
While you may disagree whether the A9 is the best chip, it's a fact that Apple designed it. Denying it shows your disillusions. As for "buying" other companies and the putting their name on it, you merely don't want to acknowledge Apple has actually built things. Like many other companies they buy smaller ones for their tech, patents, people, etc. But they also spend years after the purchase making things.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.