The A8 chip is "only" a dual-core and clocked at a relatively modest 1.4GHz. It's heartening to see it beat competing 2+GHz Quad-cores. To me, it looks like Apple is comfortable enough with their marketing strategy to stay away from the pointless GHz rat-race that exists in the Android world.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth</a>
The really interesting data point to me is the 6+'s 13.7 hours of WiFi browsing versus the LG G3's 8.8 hours. Both are 5.5" screens with ~3000 mAh batteries, but the iOS/A8 combo lasts more than 50% longer.
To give you a faint idea of how meaningless battery benchmarks are vis-à-vis real life usage, here are results from Phone Arena - <a href="http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-endurance-kings-Sony-Xperia-Z3-and-Z3-Compact-score-a-record-battery-life_id60922" rel="nofollow">http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-endurance-...</a> - 9+ hrs for Xperia Z3 and 6+ for iPhone 6+ which is lesser than the S5.<p>"We measure battery life by running a custom web-script, designed to replicate the power consumption of typical real-life usage"<p>In other words I would be very surprised if any of these benchmarks translate to anything close to the numbers they proclaim.
I'm surprised no one mentioned the ability to use custom ROMs and kernels on android devices with optimized CPU governers and overclocking on demand and how that affects the phone's performance.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I'll try to run all of the benchmarks sometimes this weekeend and do a post.
I was waiting for some independent battery tests and this kind of confirms what I suspected would happen. Apple is back to absolutely destroying Android on the battery front.<p>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.<p>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)<p>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.<p>Nice to see Apple put the screws down.
I'd like to see some PC-phone comparisons now that they're starting to approach parity. By my calculations, the new iPhone seems to be roughly as fast as a 3 - 4 year old Macbook Air.
There's a handy Reddit thread[0] with reports of actual "real world" usage.<p>[0]<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2gzxx1/post_your_battery_stats_screenshots_when_your/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2gzxx1/post_your_batt...</a>
I think the real standout here is NVIDIA. Shield was such an interesting product from the very beginning, it's nice to see how it is actually holding up against some of the "big boys".
Seems like Apple really knows what consumers want. I spend about 90% of my iPhone time in Safari/Chrome. Advanced 3D graphics are nice and all but I rarely take advantage of them, I'd expect that most users are the same.
OT: AnandTech founder Anand Shimpi retires from journalism to work at Apple: <a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/anandtech-founder-anand-shimpi-retires-from-journalism-to-work-at-apple/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/anandtech-founder-ana...</a>
Do we know how Apple's Cyclone shows roughly 4x better IPC against Krait at Sunspider benchmark? Are the extra registers and bigger L1 enough to explain that?