14 DAY TRIAL // The iPhone and the iPod touch have generally been on par regarding performance, but this year’s refresh leaves a huge gap between the iPhone 5 and the fifth-generation iPod touch.
One thing readers should note is that, although Apple’s latest smartphone is dubbed “iPhone 5,” the handset is actually at its sixth-generation, whereas the iPod touch is at its fifth.
With that out of the way, the people at Primate Labs have released new Geekbench scores for Apple’s latest devices, including the performance of the newest iPod touch.
There’s a huge discrepancy between the score of the fifth-generation player (619) and the iPhone 5, which fared 1574 points.
For those of you asking why, it mostly has to do with the processors used by these devices.
The iPhone 5 is equipped with an A6 custom-built silicon with 1GB of RAM, two processing cores and three graphics (GPU) cores, as well as other improvements.
The iPod touch, however, only uses the A5 processor originally introduced with the iPhone 4S.
Apple could have included the A5X SoC (system-on-a-chip) from the third-generation iPad, but production costs were probably of the essence here.