Apple iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus review Part 2

This is the second part of our two part combined iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus review. In Part 1, we took a look at the design and construction of the new iPhones, along with the new larger and much improved displays as well as the all-new front and rear iSight cameras. In each of these areas, Apple has continued to raise the bar with at least one or more significant improvements over the previous generation. In this second part of our review, we take a closer look at the performance of the new models, their connectivity options, Touch ID/Apple Pay, iOS 8 and weigh up which of the two new iPhones might be best for you.

Performance: The iPhone 5s set a new benchmark for smartphone performance, vaulting into an all 64-bit mobile architecture more than twelve months ahead of the competition. In an industry where much technology is shared between mobile vendors, Apple's capability to design the ARM-based chips that power its devices became a clear differentiator with the arrival of the dual-core 64-bit A7 system-on-a-chip. It featured around 1 billion transistors and helped to power the iPhone past its multi-core rivals in numerous performance indicators. In particular, in single-core performance, a key metric for everyday usability and speed, the A7 chip still leads many competing 32-bit chips still powering Android and Windows devices today. This, despite being a dual-core design and clocked at just 1.3GHz.

Source: Chipworks

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus both share the same system architecture, which is underpinned by Apple second-generation 64-bit SoC, the A8. Like the A7, the A8 is a dual-core design and is clocked just 100MHz higher than its predecessor, but is built on a new advanced 20-nanometer process by TSMC and uses an enhanced version of the Cyclone architecture first introduced by Apple on the A7. However, incredibly Apple has managed to pack in twice the number of transistors on the die this time around, taking the transistor count to a desktop-class 2 billion. Combined with what is thought to be Imagination VR's PowerVR 4-core GX6450, Apple claims that the new dual-core A8 chip is 25 percent faster than the A7, while its graphics performance is up to 50 percent faster than the 4-core PowerVR G6430 GPU in the iPhone 5s. As the A8 chip is now also up to 50 percent more energy efficient than the A7, Apple says that it is able to sustain peak performance for much longer helping to reduce, among other things, dropped frame rates when playing graphics intensive games for extended periods also without excessive battery drain.

Power management is also assisted by the second generation M8 motion coprocessor, which is a low power ARM-based secondary processing system designed to offload motion data calculations from the A8 CPU. The new M8 chip follows the same principles as the M7 motion coprocessor from the iPhone 5s, which turns the iPhone into an advanced fitness tracker in conjunction with apps that can monitor your activity throughout the day in the background without draining in battery life; in earlier versions of the iPhone, similar capabilities were possible using the iPhone's sensors, but they relied heavily on the main CPU. Now, in addition to measuring data from the accelerometer, compass and gyroscope the iPhone 6 adds a new barometer that is capable of measuring how many flights of stairs you've climbed or the intensity of your hill runs.

To test the performance of the new A8 SoC, we ran the both iPhone 6s through a couple of well-known cross platform tests; Geekbench 3 (which assesses single and multi-core performance), as well as the Futuremark 3DMark benchmark to test graphics performance. As you can see in the GeekBench 3 results, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus annihilate the 32-bit competition in single-core performance, which is the key performance metric as most apps only use one core. Multicore performance is now also a match for the competition, despite the fact that the Android devices each have an extra two cores. The 3D Mark test shows that have made solid gains over the iPhone 5s, but are generally a match for the Adreno 330 GPU found in the Android devices. However, this test does not test the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus with games running the Metal framework, which gives the iPhones a substantial performance boost. As always, this is a case of Apple looking to optimize its hardware through creating better, more efficient software. This way, Apple gets better graphics performance than the competition, without sacrificing battery life.

Read more:
Apple iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus review Part 2