The Apple iPhone 11, 11 Pro & 11 Pro Max Review: Performance, Battery, & Camera Elevated
by Andrei Frumusanu on October 16, 2019 8:30 AM ESTSystem & ML Performance
Having investigated the new A13’s CPU performance, it’s time to look at how it performs in some system-level tests. Unfortunately there’s still a frustrating lack of proper system tests for iOS, particularly when it comes to tests like PCMark that would more accurately represent application use-cases. In lieu of that, we have to fall back to browser-based benchmarks. Browser performance is still an important aspect of device performance, as it remains one of the main workloads that put large amounts of stress on the CPU while exhibiting performance characteristics such as performance latency (essentially, responsiveness).
As always, the following benchmarks aren’t just a representation of the hardware capabilities, but also the software optimizations of a phone. iOS13 has again increased browser-based benchmarks performance by roughly 10% in our testing. We’ve gone ahead and updated the performance figures of previous generation iPhones with new scores on iOS13 to have proper Apple-to-Apple comparisons for the new iPhone 11’s.
In Speedometer 2.0 we see the new A13 based phones exhibit a 19-20% performance increase compared to the previous generation iPhone XS and the A12. The increase is in-line with Apple’s performance claims. The increase this year is a bit smaller than what we saw last year with the A12, as it seems the main boost to the scores last year was the upgrade to a 128KB L1I cache.
JetStream 2 is a newer browser benchmark that was released earlier this year. The test is longer and possibly more complex than Speedometer 2.0 – although we still have to do proper profiling of the workload. The A13’s increases here are about 13%. Apple’s chipsets, CPUs, and custom Javascript engine continue to dominate the mobile benchmarks, posting double the performance we see from the next-best competition.
Finally WebXPRT represents more of a “scaling” workload that isn’t as steady-state as the previous benchmarks. Still, even here the new iPhones showcase a 18-19% performance increase.
Last year Apple made big changes to the kernel scheduler in iOS12, and vastly shortened the ramp-up time of the CPU DVFS algorithm, decreasing the time the system takes to transition from lower idle frequencies and small cores idle to full performance of the large cores. This resulted in significantly improved device responsiveness across a wide range of past iPhone generations.
Compared to the A12, the A13 doesn’t change all that much in terms of the time it takes to reach the maximum clock-speed of the large Lightning cores, with the CPU core reaching its peak in a little over 100ms.
What does change a lot is the time the workload resides on the smaller Thunder efficiency cores. On the A13 the small cores are ramping up significantly faster than on the A12. There’s also a major change in the scheduler behavior and when the workload migrates from the small cores to the large cores. On the A13 this now happens after around 30ms, while on the A12 this would take up to 54ms. Due to the small cores no longer being able to request higher memory controller performance states on their own, it likely makes sense to migrate to the large cores sooner now in the case of a more demanding workload.
The A13’s Lightning cores are start off at a base frequency of around 910MHz, which is a bit lower than the A12 and its base frequency of 1180MHz. What this means is that Apple has extended the dynamic range of the large cores in the A13 both towards higher performance as well as towards the lower, more efficient frequencies.
Machine Learning Inference Performance
Apple has also claimed to have increased the performance of their neural processor IP block in the A13. To use this unit, you have to make use of the CoreML framework. Unfortunately we don’t have a custom tool for testing this as of yet, so we have to fall back to one of the rare external applications out there which does provide a benchmark for this, and that’s Master Lu’s AIMark.
Like the web-browser workloads, iOS13 has brought performance improvements for past devices, so we’ve rerun the iPhone X and XS scores for proper comparisons to the new iPhone 11.
The improvements for the iPhone 11 and the new A13 vary depending on the model and workload. For the classical models such as InceptionV3 and ResNet34, we’re seeing 23-29% improvements in the inference rate. MobileNet-SSD sees are more limited 17% increase, while DeepLabV3 sees a major increase of 48%.
Generally, the issue of running machine learning benchmarks is that it’s running through an abstraction layer, in this case which is CoreML. We don’t have guarantees on how much of the model is actually being run on the NPU versus the CPU and GPU, as things can differ a lot depending on the ML drivers of the device.
Nevertheless, the A13 and iPhone 11 here are very competitive and provide good iterative performance boosts for this generation.
Performance Conclusion
Overall, performance on the iPhone 11s is excellent, as we've come to expect time and time again from Apple. With that said, however, I can’t really say that I notice too much of a difference to the iPhone XS in daily usage. So while the A13 delivers class leading performance, it's probably not going to be very compelling for users coming from last year's A12 devices; the bigger impact will be felt coming from older devices. Otherwise, with this much horsepower I feel like the user experience would benefit significantly more from an option to accelerate application and system animations, or rather even just turn them off completely, in order to really feel the proper snappiness of the hardware.
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dudedud - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
Nice as always Andrei.Are you expecting something similar for the A77 on the 865, as in a modest performant improvement at a higher consumption cost? Or do you think that the rumored 7nm EUV from Samsung is going to surpass current N7pro of TSMC?
Andrei Frumusanu - Saturday, October 19, 2019 - link
From what I heard, I don't expect 7LPP to be better performing than N7.0iron - Wednesday, October 16, 2019 - link
When first I saw 'camera elevated', I hope they have very good video stabilization like GoPro. Looks like we have to wait few more generations (or never) to have that kind of smooth when shooting a video.I believe with A13, it shouldn't lack any processing power that GoPro has. It just need to get it right on software side.
Hxx - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
The best out of all of them is the iPhone 11 that is if you want an iPhone. Still surprised they lowered the price. I wish I could justify the nicer screen but I can't and playing with all 3 of them at my local best buy couldn't convince me either. My X is still going strong but I may get the 11 as im due for an upgrade. Thanks for the review.Zou Tianyou - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
I wish you can make a kirin 990 and mate30 pro review!Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
I will.VG - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
> I don’t know it was me holding the phone any different between those two paths.EIS kicked in when autofocus caught an object (tree or building) and fixed on it.
What about storage speed test?
id4andrei - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Great review Andrei, best in fact.All other sites listed audio as a clear improvement. It seems they lied. It's a regression in fact.
Also the camera is not that best in class as written by mainstream pundits. The wideangle is disappointing and the low light feature is something you cannot control and can overexpose.
cha0z_ - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
Great review! Andrei, can you comment on the scratch resistance of the screen? There is 50+ pages (for two weeks only) on the official apple forum that the screen scratches absurdly easy with a lot deep scratches, wide scratches, etc. If you didn't use a screen protector, can you tell us how the one in you hold?Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, October 17, 2019 - link
I use my phones naked because I'm perverted in that way. Generally you're asking the wrong person here as I haven't scratched my daily drivers ever in many years - the only scratches I have ever gotten was on the backside when laying the phones on some rougher surface.