iPhone 4S Is Blazing Fast Despite 800 MHz A5 Chip

Early benchmark tests indicate that Apple’s iPhone 4S screams in terms of performance. It’s about 70 percent faster than the iPhone 4, and almost just as fast as the powerful iPad 2.

Pitted against various powerful smartphones in several benchmark tests, the iPhone 4S scored significantly higher than most competing devices. The phone packs a dual core A5 chip clocked at 800 MHz (200 MHz lower than the iPad 2 version) and 512MB RAM.

For example, the iPhone 4S scored 2222 in the SunSpider Javascript benchmark 0.9, just 2 points behind the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 running Android 3.1 Honeycomb.

By comparison, the iPhone 4 scored 3921, which is worse because the figures reveal performance in milliseconds. In other words, lower is better here.

Where higher was better - the Rightware BrowserMark - the iPhone 4S again blew competition out of the water, as well as its siblings.

Scoring an impressive 98567 point average, the iPhone 4S beat the aforementioned Samsung tablet by roughly 1,000 points. The same test lists the iPhone 4 with a score of 51701 points, and the 3GS at 37276.

Geekbench overall results put the iPad 2 at the top of the performance list with a score of 751 pts. Tracking it with an equally impressive score of 623 points was, of course, the iPhone 4S. Then came the iPhone 4, then the 3GS, as it was only natural.

The Geekbench processor integer performance showed pretty much the same results. Had the iPhone 4S packed a 1GHz A5 (like the iPad 2), performance would have been even higher, but the phone’s battery would have drained accordingly, according to Anandtech.

Finally, the test that looks at how devices handle graphics (the GLBenchMark) saw the iPhone 4S score 73.1, over 30 points more than the Samsung Galaxy S2, which packs a 1.2 GHz processor. By contrast, the iPad 2 scored 85.7 points.