Benchmarks Show iPhone 5's A6 is Twice as Fast as A5 Chip

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.

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