After months of rumors and leaks, the iPhone 6 was officially announced earlier this week. With the device set to hit retail availability a week from now, we’re starting to see first benchmark results surface of the iPhone 6.
Rightware, a Finnish organization that provides benchmarking utilities, has found that there isn’t a drastic improvement in terms of performance on the iPhone 6 from its predecessor. The iPhone 5S, with its dual-core Cyclone CPU and PowerVR GX6650 GPU, managed to net a maximum benchmark score of 20253, while the iPhone 6 achieved a score of 21204, an improvement of less than 5%. In comparison, Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ: QCOM) Adreno 330, the GPU found in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 and Snapdragon 801 netted a score of 25346 on Rightware’s tests. In fact, on their leaderboard, the iPhone 6 comes in at 17, trailing the likes of the Nexus 5 and the Galaxy S5. While it does not make a lot of sense to compare the iPhone’s hardware to that of a device running Android, the benchmark scores are an empirical way to gauge the performance.
The A8 SoC used in the iPhone 6 is the world’s first 20 nm SoC, with Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) quick to point out that it contains 2 billion transistors, twice as many as those used in the A7. The A8 continues on the 64-bit tradition that began last year with the Cyclone CPU on the A7, and even though the 100 MHz increase in clocks from the A7 to the A8 CPU does not seem like a vast change, Apple is claiming a performance increase of 25% from the previous generation, which means that there are a lot of optimizations going on beneath the hood. The GPU section is where a more significant change is witnessed, with Apple touting a 50% increase from the earlier generation, thanks to the six-core PowerVR GX6650.
We should be getting a more detailed set of benchmarks detailing the performance of the A8 CPU and the GPU on the iPhone 6 once the device launches.
