iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus: Preliminary Benchmark Results
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
Everything else was either single threaded (all the browser benchmarks), in which case dual vs. quad is irrelevant, or they were GPU bottlenecked in which case you aren't talking 1.4GHz dual core, and on the GPU front Apple spends a huge amount of transistors on that. They throw oodles of power at the GPU.
Also thanks to power management the vast, vast majority of those "2+GHz Quad-cores" were not running at 2+GHz, they were running at closer to 1.4-1.6 GHz. Apple is really good about settings its max frequency to something sustainable, whereas everyone else advertises burst frequencies.
There is going to be painting and such while the benchmark runs, which will use a second thread, but that's about it. And that's going to be relatively light compared to actual usage where you're scrolling around and such.
The majority of the other threads of a browser are I/O bound (networking, disk, etc...) and won't be using much of the CPU.
Just because Qualcomm's design achieves high clock speeds doesn't mean there's a rat-race in the Android world. Since Qualcomm dominates, there is no race at all. Second, Qualcomm's competitors are much more moderately clocked. Samsung's, Intel's and Nvidia's current high end chips don't even touch 2 GHz yet.
For a rat race you need rats and a race. But there's only one rat and no race.
Critically even though they may not always have the best CPU cores or best GPUs, they do have the best radios. And integrating that into the SoC is just better from a power perspective, making Snapdragon overall the best SoC package for a phone.
Isn't that just... competitive?
In day to day life your performance is going to be in between these two extremes.
They show how a Moto E is more responsive than a Galaxy S5. Full stack system performance, when doable, gives you this kind of leverage.
Mind you I'm not a game player or anything, this is just the normal stuff of having a podcast app, spotify, HN and a few others daily used apps. Great phone, but it can't compare with a flagship. (I carried a Nexus 5 before)
Apple went "retina" to end the pixel-count competition: if you can't see the pixels, you don't care how many there are. Apple refused to state RAM size for mobile devices from the beginning: user doesn't have an option, and rarely (if ever) notices the limit, so the actual memory size doesn't matter. Processor count & speed is irrelevant if it's used efficiently enough to practically outrun the competition.
Sure, Apple does provide some specs. People are too used to seeing such numbers, despite few needing to see them IF the implementation is done right. People want options, so some specs are flexible (at a price). But remember that behind the scenes at retail, the devices options are labeled little more than "Good, Better, Best": most users don't want better numbers, they want superior performance with whatever it's got. Those gloating about size are likely less able to use it.
There's an old saw about the railroads getting killed by the tractor trailer in the 20th century because they thought they were in the railroad business, when in fact they were in the transportation business. This time, Apple knows exactly what business it's in, while the competition seems to have no idea (compare the highly-curated experience of shopping/buying/shipping/using an Apple product to the Android or Lenovo analogue).
Obviously power is more complex than just that, but seriously Android's reputation for being inefficient is really not justified due to things like this, where resolution differences are completely ignored.
Certainly the GPU on the iPhone 6+ is going to take more power because it's rendering at 1242x2208 rather than 1920x1080, but that's a minor effect compared to the physical screen power draw.
That very much IS most of the overall power budget. That was very not a guess on my part.
Someone made a claim that controlling the hardware and software stack was the driver for being able to do well, powerwise.
I'm saying that controlling the hardware and software stack probably had less to do with this performance than the GPU only needing to push 40% as many pixels. I would also bet the overall hardware PM is better in Apple's chips.
Software wise, there is only so much you can do that has any real impact, given that screen is 40% of power and cell is another 20%.
Past that, only real way to save power is often to make stuff run faster.
But to give you some perspective, if you take any of these phones, turn off cell usage and shove them in a drawer, they should last at least a week.
Apple is very good at convincing people of what they want (i don't think they simply give people what people already wanted). In a case like this, IMHO, they could have had slightly better battery life than the 5S, and said "we've packed a lot more power in the same battery life", and people would have likely been fine with it.
"We measure battery life by running a custom web-script, designed to replicate the power consumption of typical real-life usage"
In other words I would be very surprised if any of these benchmarks translate to anything close to the numbers they proclaim.
What the discrepancy tells you is that there's something odd about the benchmarks that could stand to be better investigated/explained.
You say odd, I say meaningless :)
Some might not remember, but the drive to bigger Android screens was actually mostly driven by battery life. Android has always been subpar in this critical respect, the first devices were absolutely terrible, I suspect primarily because Dalvik is nowhere near as efficient as cross-compiled objective C and the rather more restrictive background task management on iOS.
iPhone 5's were holding their own and then some against the much larger battery Android devices, so now that they batteries are the same on the 6's there is no contest. Yes, bigger screens do eat more battery, but the ratio of battery/screen size actually favors bigger screens, ergo why tablets get incredible battery life. (and why the Note has always been a great battery performer)
I've carried a Nexus since the very first one, but I think I might jump to a 6+, the advantages are too much to ignore. I'll wait to see what the Nexus X is first as I really love Android these days, but I sure would love that battery life and camera.
Nice to see Apple put the screws down.
I know a lot of people would much prefer a slightly thicker iPhone 6 (that didn't require the camera to protrude, for one) if it meant a larger battery.
Android stock branded phones are packed with bloatware from the carriers. This is something apple actually has a grip on due to how closed their platform is.
I'm running c-rom with lean kernel on my Galaxy Note 3 and running just one of those benchmarking programs, I get results that are a lot better than what anandtech shows. Still not better than apple, but pretty close to them for a last generation phone.
I'll try to run all of the benchmarks sometimes this weekeend and do a post.
Side note, I'm confused, you bought an Android phone because you wanted a non-Android smart phone? HTC Sense is still Android, just with a custom skin.
I've got a unbranded version of android suited for my phone with an optimized kernel (lean kernel).
It runs a lot faster, the battery lasts longer, and I don't have to deal with 200+ bloatware apps on the phone...
Here's the page for C-ROM. See if it's compatible with your device.
lean kernel for note 3 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2488233
Your best bet is to just get on xda-developers forums and go to your device's section.
[0]http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2gzxx1/post_your_batt...
The improvements we see in benchmarks can thus easily be lost in the noise.
So Standby time is basically "Time off Charger", and Usage is supposed to be "Screen on time"? Except I have a feeling that "Usage" includes any time when your phone is not sleeping (which would include not just the time when you have the screen on but also any time when the processor is doing stuff in the background).
What draws me to that conclusion is the ratio of usage to standby time that some people in that thread have. I have a hard time believing that most people are staring at their screens for half of their waking life. I mean even if you didn't leave the house all day you'd still have to take your eyes off the thing to prepare food, urinate, put your clothes on.
I’m not quite sure how the phone counts background activity that doesn’t notify the user or require user interaction (e.g. Mail checking for new emails, …).
Check the following: https://www.apple.com/support/iphone5-battery/
For what it’s worth, my 5s gets about six hours of intense use. 50% brightness, Twitter, Safari, RSS reader, mix of WiFi and cell towers, mostly good reception. Five hours with only cell towers, average to good reception.
However, since the iPhones have such tiny batteries their battery use is also highly dependent on how you use your device. With something downloading (especially over LTE) I can practically see my battery draining and it gets quite hot.
Bigger devices with much larger batteries are a bit more sedate in their reactiveness to that, e.g. my iPad is much more constant in its battery usage. No matter what I do, it always gets nearly the same battery time. (Maybe because battery usage is much more dominated by the screen which has a constant battery use, so the other two big battery consuming components which are variable, radios and SoC, have a smaller difference in impact between being nearly idle and running at full tilt.)
On Wifi 10 hours sounds closer to my experience than 1-2 hours.
That would be amazing to have 13 hours of browsing with a new phone. (as reported in the article)
Got an iPhone 6 on friday.
Yesterday I went on a 2.5 hour, 30 mile bike ride, and the iphone6 battery meter was essentially still at 100%. My 4s would have been well under 50%. Of course, the M8 is why, but after 3 years of recharging the 4s every night the battery was really starting to feel it.
When browsing on weak LTE the situation is different and 1-2 hours sounds very plausible. Maps/navigation can take big chunks out of the battery in a period of an hour or two and I need +60% before I set out on a 3 hour bike ride with Cyclemeter on.
Currently top grossing for the US: Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, Pandora, Game of War - Fire Age, Farm Heroes Saga.
It would mean that all the built in apps, and all the free apps in the App Store relatively unused, and that advertising models are a fools errand as no-one spends enough time in the apps. I suspect companies persuing these kinds of apps, including apple, are seeing enough usage to make a business case for their actions.
Games are extraordinarily popular on iOS. I see people gaming constantly on planes, trains, busses, etc.
edit: I'd also like to point out that there are two interesting metrics here: time and battery usage. It's possible for me to spend the majority of my time on boring stuff, but the majority of my battery on non-boring stuff. I'm guessing, though (again, without data and purely based on my own biases) that most people spend most of their time and battery on the boring stuff.
When I think graphically heavy I think of games like Infinity Blade. Candy Crush has extremely simple 2D graphics, same with Farm Heroes Saga and Clash of Clans.
I can't imagine Smash Bros. on a phone. Not unless the phone gets analog sticks, face buttons, and shoulder triggers. Maybe there will be a shell that gets wide support, but given the fact that cases come in so many form factors and that Android phones have no standard shape, I doubt that will happen.
I don't mean to be negative, but phones utterly suck at the kind of games I enjoy most. 2048 is genius, but it's a phone thing.
Does anyone foresee a non-casual, non-contol limited future for mobile gaming? What changes could give it the ability to compete with the 3DS and Vita?
>there's not really any good games for the iphone
You're contradicting yourself unless you're saying that you personally don't like any of the games.
Although battery performance should probably be normalized to battery size / amperage, yeah. Bigger phones usually have the same resolution as their smaller siblings but larger battery capacity.
Seems like bigger devices will usually squander their extra resources however and have similar performance to the smaller devices.
As for why, Cyclone's core are bigger, wider compared to Krait/Cortex, and are Out Of Order. (This is a nice article on that: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/179473-apples-a7-cyclon...)