iPhone 5/A6 SunSpider Performance: Faster than Intel's Atom Z2460

Stefan Mileschin · 19th September 2012, 08:44

The first iPhone 5 reviews have lifted, confirming the leaked Geekbench data we saw in our earlier post. Apple's A6 appears to feature two custom ARM cores running at up to 1GHz. A new datapoint comes courtesy of our own Brian Klug who's currently visiting LG in Seoul, South Korea. He ran into Vincent Nguyen of Slashgear fame, who kindly let him run SunSpider 0.9.1 on Vincent's iPhone 5 review sample. The score? 914.7ms.

SunSpider is quickly outlasting its welcome as a smartphone benchmark, but it does do a great job of highlighting issues with the Cortex A9's memory interface. Intel originally hinted at issues in the A9's memory interface as being why Atom was able to so easily outperform other ARM based SoCs in SunSpider. As we surmised in our A6 Geekbench post, it looks like Apple specifically targeted improvements in the memory subsystem when designing the A6's CPU cores. The result is the fastest SunSpider test we've ever recorded on a smartphone - faster even than Intel's Atom Z2460.

This doesn't tell us much about the A6's architecture other than it's likely got a better cache/memory interface than ARM's Cortex A9. What we really need is for someone to port SPECint to iOS...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6309/i...er-performance

19th September 2012, 08:44	#1
Stefan Mileschin [M] Reviewer Join Date: May 2010 Location: Romania Posts: 148,553	iPhone 5/A6 SunSpider Performance: Faster than Intel's Atom Z2460 The first iPhone 5 reviews have lifted, confirming the leaked Geekbench data we saw in our earlier post. Apple's A6 appears to feature two custom ARM cores running at up to 1GHz. A new datapoint comes courtesy of our own Brian Klug who's currently visiting LG in Seoul, South Korea. He ran into Vincent Nguyen of Slashgear fame, who kindly let him run SunSpider 0.9.1 on Vincent's iPhone 5 review sample. The score? 914.7ms. SunSpider is quickly outlasting its welcome as a smartphone benchmark, but it does do a great job of highlighting issues with the Cortex A9's memory interface. Intel originally hinted at issues in the A9's memory interface as being why Atom was able to so easily outperform other ARM based SoCs in SunSpider. As we surmised in our A6 Geekbench post, it looks like Apple specifically targeted improvements in the memory subsystem when designing the A6's CPU cores. The result is the fastest SunSpider test we've ever recorded on a smartphone - faster even than Intel's Atom Z2460. This doesn't tell us much about the A6's architecture other than it's likely got a better cache/memory interface than ARM's Cortex A9. What we really need is for someone to port SPECint to iOS... http://www.anandtech.com/show/6309/i...er-performance

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Intel's Next-Gen Atom Processors Only to Arrive End of 2013	Stefan Mileschin	WebNews	0	16th July 2012 07:53
Intel's USB 3.0 controller is faster than AMD's, too	Stefan Mileschin	WebNews	0	11th April 2012 08:34
Intel sort of announces the Atom Z2460	Stefan Mileschin	WebNews	0	12th January 2012 07:18
Intel's Medfield & Atom Z2460 Arrive for Smartphones: It's Finally Here	Stefan Mileschin	WebNews	0	11th January 2012 08:37
New Intel Atom CPUs will be faster than Phenom II	jmke	WebNews	0	29th July 2011 14:34
Intel's Cedarview Atom to sport PowerVR graphics	jmke	WebNews	0	11th May 2011 08:19
Oak Trail – Intel's new energy efficient Atom Z series	jmke	WebNews	0	20th February 2010 11:05
Why Pine Trail Isn't Much Faster Than the First Atom	jmke	WebNews	0	28th January 2010 09:11
Intel's Pine Trail-M Atom reduces footprint by 64%	jmke	WebNews	0	2nd December 2009 15:37
Intel's Atom processor unveiled	jmke	WebNews	2	2nd April 2008 21:58