Benchmarks Show iPhone 5's A6 is Twice as Fast as A5 Chip
How does the iPhone 5 stack up against previous iOS devices and its Android competitors?
When Apple unveiled the iPhone 5 last week, the company revealed that it was running on an Apple A6 chip. However, there wasn't a whole lot said about the chip itself. Thankfully, the weekend has brought us some benchmarks, courtesy of Geekbench, which shed some light on the chip that makes this smartphone go.
Geekbench's results say the iPhone 5's processor is a dual-core 1.02 GHz ARMv7 CPU. This flies in the face of previous reports that the Apple A6 was an A15 or A9 chip. The iPhone 5 posted a Geekbench score of 1601. To put that in perspective, the iPad 3's dual-core A5X scored 797 with Geekbench, and the dual-core A5 in the iPhone 4S scored just 632. If these Geekbench numbers are accurate, iPhone 5 users can expect performance that's double that of an iPhone 4S.
When you pit the iPhone 5 against Android, the Galaxy S III just squeaks in past the iPhone 5 with a score of 1628, while the Nexus 7 tablet scores a 1604. The next Android phone to score close to the iPhone 5's 1608 is the HTC One S, which boasts a Geekbench score of 1277. The A6's score of 1608 matches that of the Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300, and ahead of the Intel Celeron 570, the AMD Opteron 148, the AMD Athlon 64 3500+, and the Intel Pentium SU4100.
The iPhone 5 is set to go on sale September 21, so expect more detailed benchmarks as the phone becomes available to the masses.
Follow @JaneMcEntegart on Twitter.
Contact Us for News Tips, Corrections and Feedback

What... Total... BS!
ARM cores sport about 0.x-2.0MIPS per clock cycle. The core2 duo pumps out ~4-5 MIPS per clock cycle, per core. Don't even get me started on FLOPS per cycle.... an ARM CPU puts out the FLOPS performance of around a 1995 pentium pro, were talking around a few hundred MFLOPS at about 1ghz IF THAT! A Core2 Duo at 3.3Ghz pumps out around 24-25 "G"FLOPS.
Where the hell does "geek bench" gets its numbers from? The numbers fairy?
I though apple usually released new devices that stomped the Android competition in performance and then Android spent the next 6 months catching up and then passing apple?
I though apple usually released new devices that stomped the Android competition in performance and then Android spent the next 6 months catching up and then passing apple?
apple does not equals performance.
look at the mac pro desktop computers. ATI 5870 is top of the line GPU for $200 additional option
LTE. Android phones supporting this eons ago.
I remember apple big thing was the 4S is just as fast as LTE during their last keynote. What happens? why upgrade to LTE this time?
Funny apple iphone5 is not even 720p.
3 years to make that ugly earphones. Serious music lovers throws away any cheap stock earphones and buy a set of shure or seinhenser
What... Total... BS!
ARM cores sport about 0.x-2.0MIPS per clock cycle. The core2 duo pumps out ~4-5 MIPS per clock cycle, per core. Don't even get me started on FLOPS per cycle.... an ARM CPU puts out the FLOPS performance of around a 1995 pentium pro, were talking around a few hundred MFLOPS at about 1ghz IF THAT! A Core2 Duo at 3.3Ghz pumps out around 24-25 "G"FLOPS.
Where the hell does "geek bench" gets its numbers from? The numbers fairy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second
That's how myths get busted...
This is what anandtech has to say: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6292/iphone-5-a6-not-a15-custom-core
Well that's a 10w, 1.3 GHz Core 2 CPU.
Anyway, AnandTech's interpretation, which is more in depth (haven't read it through fully though) is here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6298/analyzing-iphone5-geekbench-results
You really think they will use it more than their brain ~5% !?!
Thanks for that, ojas. This is something that I did not expect Apple to do, but it's not a huge surprise IMO. Honestly, I think that they did a good job on this apparently custom design (although as I said earlier, most iPhone buyers probably won't make use of that performance unless new software such as good games or something liek that are made that can really use it). Does it beat the best ARM CPUs used in any Android phone in performance per core per MHz? I'll have to do some searching
If we look here, there are Galaxy S3 results with scores over 1900 and over 2050 and that's without overclocking. Does anyone know what causes this discrepancy between all of these Galaxy S3 scores? Also, is this highly threaded performance or lightly threaded performance? If it's highly threaded performance, then although it'd possibly be better for heavy multi-tasking, then the iPhone 5 might have an advantage in single/dual threaded performance if it is only using a dual-core CPU.
I think it's amazing that all these smart phones match or slightly beat an Intel Core 2 duo's performance. Talk about the pace of processing power... All in a device that lasts hours.
P.S. Apple's iOS performance on my iPhone 4 is much smoother than Jellybean on my Nexus 7... While I love my Nexus 7 and Project butter made a huge difference but performance isn't all benchmarks, it's how well you use all the CPU. And for all us iSheep having an OS that moves smoothly is important.
xoxo
From my Nexus 7
The Core 2 Duo SU7300 is a 10W, 1.3GHz model. Even an FX-4100 has more than double the integer performance per core.