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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doobydoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
GL Benchmark is not going to be a pretty story for Android fans :Ptipoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
You know, saying _____ fans will be ______ is almost as annoying as the fans themselves saying it. This is a benchmark and numbers site, benchmarks bring us all together, lets just appreciate the SoC for what it is. I guess you could say I'm an Android "fan" but I'm really excited that Apple just entered the ARM CPU race in a big way.doobydoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
Alright, calm down there fella...Let me rephrase:
'I believe the GL Benchmarks will be dominated by the new iPhone 5 which will significantly surpass the performance of any Android handset to date'
tipoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
I wasn't un-calm, just saying. The best way to reduce fanboyism in comments is just not to talk about it.doobydoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
He says - continuing the discussion about fanboyism.yogi6807 - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
i put it in the right spot this time"A little bit of casual benchmarking using the GLBenchmark Egypt High test yielded a score of 6766, while the iPhone 4S got 1158. The Offscreen test was closer: 16681 vs 8346. This looks like a lot more than day to day usage bears out, but it suggests that there's headroom for the iPhone 5 to do some pretty impressive stuff."
http://www.stuff.tv/review/apple-iphone-5
bill4 - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
When I first read it I thought, "Oh, Anand must be showing how amazing it is that A6 outscores a low end X86 Atom like you find in notebooks!"But no, googling reveals it's just Intel's smartphone chip. Big deal, lol.
André - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
I believe you are missing the point entirely.tipoo - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
I might remember wrong, but isn't the Atom in smartphones shown above pretty close to netbook Atom in Sunspider performance?madmilk - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
Yes, performance is about the same as the old single core Atoms in netbooks from 2008.Intel missed the best time to ship Medfield by about 6 months, when it would have been a viable competitor against dual core A9 chipsets. The gap is getting shorter though...