14 DAY TRIAL // Tests carried out on Apple’s dual-core A6 chip with triple-core graphics have determined that the iPhone 5 is the leader of the pack in smartphone performance today.
After conducting thorough benchmarks like Sunspider, Browsermark, Guimark 3 Bitmap, and GLBenchmark 2.5, PCMag.com determined that the iPhone 5 is not only twice as fast as its predecessor, but it’s also “the fastest handheld computer sold in the US.”
In other words, the iPhone 5 is the world’s fastest smartphone.
The reviewers were careful to note that “a phone's hardware performance can't be taken in isolation, but it's definitely a piece of the puzzle.”
Samsung’s attempts to take the iPhone’s crown with the Galaxy S III seem more feeble with the passing of each day. The Korean electronics maker will have to rely on its upcoming S4 to take another shot at Apple’s victor.
Geeks might be interested in the technicalities behind Apple’s achievement, and we won’t deny them the pleasure of seeing UBM TechInsights’ first diffusion images of Apple's A6 SoC (system-on-a-chip).
AnandTech describes the landscape which contains two 32-bit LPDDR2 memory channels and three GPU cores, noting, “We're likely looking at a PowerVR SGX 543MP3 running at 266MHz.”
UBM, which performed a teardown of the A6 silicon, estimates the die size at 95.04mm2. Samsung is likely the manufacturer, the analysts at UBM note.
The A6 is also known to house two ARMv7 cores clocked at 1.02GHz each, and 1GB of RAM running at 1066MHz.
It sports the same caches as the A5 processor in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 – 32KB L1 instruction, 32KB LA data, 1MB L2.
However, the iPad 3’s A5X chip is still faster in memory bandwidth, despite being one generation older than the iPhone 5’s A6.