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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mavere - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
With iOS6, the 4S should score in the ~1800 range.I was going to request adding iOS6 4S results, but I realize you might not have a 4S on hand or even a dev account.
agent2099 - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
I thought full version software updates to iPhones usually results in them performing worse, has this changed?lowlymarine - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Overall yes, but usually the update to the underlying JS engine will improve the Sunspider score. For example, on my 3G after iOS 4 landed, my Sunspider score nearly halved, while absolutely everything else about the phone become an intolerably slow pile of bugs and failure.Which really just serves to highlight how totally useless Sunspider is as a benchmark.
ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Usually it's decreased general responsiveness that's the complaint. Safari is improved with every iOS version so the browser usually performs better regardless. And the major performance concern with iOS updates was really focused on the iPhone 3G and iOS 4.0. I believe Anandtech found the iPhone 3GS survived the transition from iOS 4 to iOS 5 without performance problems so hopefully the transition to iOS 6 goes just as smoothly.AlexTheUkrainian - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
You were close! I am getting 1743 on 4S with iOS 6.macs - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
And I get 1440 with the new iPad on iOS 6anexanhume - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
The massive memory bandwidth on the iPad 3 helps.danielfranklin - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
If I remember right, Anand's testing proved the CPUs in the A5x didn't have access to the bandwidth, mem scores were unchanged, all the bandwidth seems to go via the GPU.Dissmeister - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
1444.6 on Droid RAZR XT910 running cm10 Jellybean. Definitely impressed, lol.SantoBr - Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - link
1286.9ms on chrome beta with webGL enable