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

By Jane McEntegart
published

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.

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Jane McEntegart
49 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ironmb
    If you're not first you're last.
    Reply
  • cknobman
    So your telling me Apple is releasing something brand new that fails to beat the current top Android smart phone in performance?

    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?
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    Given that a test of Apple's iPhone 4S users showed that at least some of them thought that an older iPhone 4 was faster than the 4S that they owned, this apparent leap in hardware performance (assuming that it is true) may be lost on deaf ears. Hopefully, the average iPhone customer isn't as stupid as those from that test.
    Reply
  • Pretty sure ARMv7 is the instruction set not the processor generation. I am fairly certain that the a8, a9, and the a15 uses ARMv7 instructions. And its impossible to make one A9 twice as fast as another at the same clock unless one is totally and utterly crippled. I am 99% certain this is an a15 cpu in the apple a6.
    Reply
  • eternalkp
    why does this surprise people?
    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
    Reply
  • "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"

    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?
    Reply
  • Here, see for yourself;

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second
    Reply
  • Woops.. meant to say per "Mhz", not per clock cycle. My bad.
    Reply
  • house70
    cknobmanSo your telling me Apple is releasing something brand new that fails to beat the current top Android smart phone in performance?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?That's how myths get busted...
    Reply
  • rahulkadukar
    Benchmark it against a quad core Qualcomm :)
    Reply