iPhone 5/A6 SunSpider Performance: Faster than Intel's Atom Z2460
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on September 19, 2012 12:49 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone 5
The first iPhone 5 reviews have lifted, confirming the leaked Geekbench data we saw in our earlier post. Apple's A6 appears to feature two custom ARM cores running at up to 1GHz. A new datapoint comes courtesy of our own Brian Klug who's currently visiting LG in Seoul, South Korea. He ran into Vincent Nguyen of Slashgear fame, who kindly let him run SunSpider 0.9.1 on Vincent's iPhone 5 review sample. The score? 914.7ms.
SunSpider is quickly outlasting its welcome as a smartphone benchmark, but it does do a great job of highlighting issues with the Cortex A9's memory interface. Intel originally hinted at issues in the A9's memory interface as being why Atom was able to so easily outperform other ARM based SoCs in SunSpider. As we surmised in our A6 Geekbench post, it looks like Apple specifically targeted improvements in the memory subsystem when designing the A6's CPU cores. The result is the fastest SunSpider test we've ever recorded on a smartphone - faster even than Intel's Atom Z2460.
This doesn't tell us much about the A6's architecture other than it's likely got a better cache/memory interface than ARM's Cortex A9. What we really need is for someone to port SPECint to iOS...
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lowlymarine - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
So that got mangled somehow. Here's the link again: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-re...My kingdom for an edit button.
bill4 - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
"The iPhone 4's score has clearly been updated for new versions of iOS, as at launch http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-re... scored over 10,000. Why shouldn't Android devices receive the same treatment? "The media/Anandtech's incredible pro Apple bias shows through LOL.
Kind of reminds me of all those sites that bench AMD cards with old driver but use newest for Nvidia.
EnzoFX - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
No, you're just out of touch. Grow up.Zink - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
The iPhone 4 is still widely sold and ships with iOS 6 installed. Most people with the phone will update to iOS 6 as well. The real number most people will see on their phone is is actually faster than shown here, about 2950.serversurfer - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
That's actually a pretty good point. Not only are Apple good about pushing out updates to existing users, they're also good about putting the current OS on the device whenever they box one up.Do Android manufacturers do the same? If v3.4 is current when the device is ready for market, in six months will they ship them instead with v4.0? Or even v3.6 or v3.5.2? Or do you need to update immediately upon opening the box?
ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
I know that at least Samsung do ship with the latest version for their phones. Galaxy S2 (international) received ICS updates and the S2's in the market now come preinstalled with ICS.tipoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
The iPhone results are on the latest final OS they can run, and sometimes they go back and update Android scores for the bigger releases. It's not high priority since it's an old phone now, but I'd like them to update the NS to ICS too, since that's an official release for it.serversurfer - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Also, by leaving the stock score on the chart, it allows you to come back years later and say, "Nice, JB cut my score in half!!" ;)ssj4Gogeta - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
Maybe they should make the graph interactive where next to the phone you can select the software version.Steelbom - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Fantastic!But... run GLBenchmark too!