iPhone 5 Javascript Benchmarks Over Twice as Fast

[fertilized-egg]

Then don't buy an IPhone. It's that simple. Not everyone has the same path to happiness.

Their happiness is complaining about Apple in Apple forums (I must agree that it sounds like a fun thing to do! )

I'm a bit surprised to see the new iPhone bettering even the Intel Medfield on Android, which does about 1000ms. As expected the single core performance of the new A6 chip looks stellar.

B-but the Galaxy SIII has Chrome....a-and a QUAD CORE Processor. It HAS to be the fastest phone on the planet in EVERYTHING. iPhone with its puny Dual Core CPU is slooow. OMG Apple FAIL

On a related note, it's a bit ironic that one application I can think of that might benefit from more cores is iMovie since it's not available in Android.

 

[SeeHole]

As this turns into the sad, frustrated wikus thread, might I point out:

iPhone versus others...

 

[viacavour]

I guess I'm in for a big treat when I upgrade my iPhone 3gs to the iPhone5 next month when my contract lets me. The 3GS started out great but now it crawls.

Yes you will ! I upgraded to 4S and was so happy. iOS 6 runs better on iPhone5 too.

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Personally - while great - I'm not a gamer. Most of my use case (on my phone) is email and some productivity apps and photo apps. So while the speed would be nice for video/photo processing, "speed" is/has never really been an issue for me on most phones I've owned. I might be in the minority on that one.

I can definitely see how if you're a gamer or are doing something (not sure what besides video editing) that is processor intensive - this is great news.

The reviewers said the basic use cases are noticeably faster. People would find it hard to go back after some time on iPhone 5. You don't have to be a gamer.

It is possible that the OS has been optimized even more. When new apps get compiled for the new CPU, it could be even faster.

 

[KnightWRX]

I'm not sure if Android has an equivalent, or if this must be all done manually.

It's not exactly automatic either in iOS. Pretty much everything lands into the main thread unless you create dispatch queues and set tasks to run in them either using dispatcher_async() or setting the queue to run code on methods that support it (like GLKit's GLKTextureLoader textureWithContentsOf* methods ) :

- (void)textureWithContentsOfFile:(NSString *)fileName options:(NSDictionary *)textureOperations queue:(dispatch_queue_t)queue completionHandler:(GLKTextureLoaderCallback)block

Android has similar model (AsyncTask) that can be used :

http://developer.android.com/guide/components/processes-and-threads.html

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Important to point out the runner up is an intel medfield phone at 1.8 GHz.

It's sad you got drowned out by all the flaming in a dumb "Android vs iOS" war. Really guys, stop this religious bullcrap.

Medfield is very interesting. It's showing how much Intel is able to compete with ARM and it dispels the myth that ARM is a much more efficient architecture than x86 which is supposedly "bloated". Intel can pretty much make the same style SoCs as ARM can and it tells us that if ARM were to try to compete in the destkop/server segment at the performance level Intel reaches, they'd probably face the same power/heat restraints Intel does.

There just isn't any magic in chip design and no one is really "years ahead" of anyone else. Moore's law is quite in effect still.

 

[viacavour]

Not exactly.

The software/OS must be designed to take advantage of more cores to make it effective.

Example 1: I need to distribute flyers around the neighborhood. 4 people to help me would be a lot better than 2. This is a task that can easily be split into 2 or 4 when necessary (but the software has to be written to do this)

Example 2: I need to drive from New York City to Philadelphia. 2 or 4 people helping me would not really matter much. There could be SLIGHT speed ups in the travel time, like some people could be in charge of making sure exact change is available for tolls, others could be looking at traffic reports to re-route us, but generally this task does not improve with the number of cores.

Apps and OS subsystems that use Grand Central Dispatch will automatically take advantage of more cores. The background tasks can use them too.

If the efficiency is high, scaling up to more cores should improve performance too. The cores already have a large pool of dispatch queues to work on.

If you look at the newer frameworks, a lot of them already expose dispatch blocks and use async model, suggesting that the internals take advantage of GCD.

 

[KnightWRX]

Apps and OS subsystems that use Grand Central Dispatch will automatically take advantage of more cores. The background tasks can use them too.

Having played around with it to parallelize tasks in my own projects recently, I can tell you there's a lot of wishful thinking about GCD. It's not so automatic at all.

A lot of the internal Apple frameworks are asynchronous, but there is still a lot of code that can't just be split up amongsts threads. This becomes apparent when debugging your application.

Also, using GCD's dispatch_async() is something you must consciously setup. You must also make sure to setup proper mutex lock or spinlocks on variables, like normal threading to prevent race conditions from occuring.

It's far from automatic and easy. Sure it's easier than plain old POSIX threads, but it's not exactly a walk in the park either. Concurrency programming never is.

 

[viacavour]

Like I said, if you use GCD, the speed up is automatic. It's not rocket science. The internals look optimized for asynchronous operations over GCD too. So there should be a fair amount of work that can run on multicore already.

iOS design has always been asynchronous anyway to reduce waiting time and modal dialogs.

 

[j4zb4]

Theres a limitation? LOL, oh man thats awful. See, its things like that, that would drive me nuts that apple users just don't accept as the downfalls of iOS
.
.
.
In total I have everything organized into 8 folders with MIUI; System Apps, Tools, News, Navigation, Internet, Productivity, Media and Games. MIUI doesnt have an app drawer, but ive never liked going through the long list of apps just to find the one i need to use so I'm not bothered by it.

So you root your phone and install a custom ROM... I do that with jailbreaking. Average users don't exceed more than 100 installed apps and don't use more than 10 apps on a daily basis. On a stock phone you can have 240 icons on one page (20 folders X 12 apps each).

Personally, and I recon I speak for a majority of users and average consumers really don't give a hoot about those gimmicks. I know gimmicks is sort of a diss... But that's what they are to me. I just want to unlock my phone and press the icon for what I want.

If I want fancy effects, I'll watch Star Wars

An average Android fan/user is too dumb to understand that not everyone has time to waste on customization. Many people don't even use a custom ringtone... Whatever phone they use they stay with the default ringtone till they discard the phone...

Oh, look, the S3 is below it. The 'turn over to mute' feature that is such a killer and puts it ahead of the iPhone 5 must be what slows it down.

I want to discuss this feature... I am sitting on my comp and the phone is on the table face up... It rings and I turn it over and its now face down... Then if it rings again does it mute again if I turn it back face up...? I think its much easier to just press the volume button to mute the tone...

Oh and I loveeee the hardware silent switch... Innumerable times I have entered meetings without putting the phone on mute and its been very handy... Just put your hand in your pocket and flip the switch... No need to remove it and unlock it to mute... Whoever came up with that idea has been blessed by me (and I am sure many others) millions of times...

My jailbroken iPhone can have all that and more!! And it's the simplest process like Absinthe 2.0. All you do is plug it in and click 1 button and wala, instant customization and the great Apple ecosystem combined in a awesome package unlike most cheap plastic Android phones!!
And don't come back with the "on android you don't need a jailbreak" when most stuff you need to do a root and do roms and all that junk which is WAYYYY more complicated than a jailbreak

And not all phones have custom ROMS released for them... I am still waiting since 3 months to find a custom ROM for my fathers Desire VC...

I already pointed out before that YOU guys are the ones who cannot touch on the lack of options in iOS instead resort to dodging the issue by bringing up android and the drawbacks of some phones.

I'll be blunt:

Quit dodging the questiong and bringing up Android when I specifically started the topic on iOS's lack of choice.

This is a mac forum... Meant for people who "CHOSE" the iPhone... Ofcourse we know its drawbacks... And ofcourse we have a right to defend our choice... You come here to annoy people and get annoyed when the people you annoy get annoyed... Weird...

I fail to understand how people like you who hate a product so much would waste such a lot of time bashing it on a forum which has been made to discuss that product among people "WHO BOUGHT THE PRODUCT"... Maybe you are paid by Samsung, a jobless troll or maybe someone who loves to annoy people...

I dropped my iPhone many times, even on concrete, hard surfaces with or without a case and it doesn't always crack. And when it does it doesn't "completely shatter". You usually get one crack which will spread on repeated drops.

I'm just glad that you can find back pieces for the iPhone 4 on eBay for like $5 shipped to replace, and the front glass isn't much more then that. Apparently also the new design of the iPhone 5 screen has simplified install. Hopefully that will mean that cracked front glass will be even easier to replace!

I don't usually drop my phone... But I have a few times... Still scratchless... I just have a screenguard on... And never ever have I put a case on any of my phones... I guess some people are just too stupid to take care of a $1000 item... Also I assume the one you quoted uses plastic and metal crockery at home... Or maybe breaks a plate or two everyday...

Don't really agree with this part. Because there are people who like to tinker their phones.

In other words, people have choice. The choice to just go with what apple has already designed, and the choice to tie up your hair and tweak to your hearts content.

And i love that

+1
Also I have never really found the use of widgets... If I want to see the weather I would just look out of the window.. It's not like I would suffer a heart attack if I didn't know the exact temperature every time I unlocked the phone... My phone also has that as a part of a theme but I find it quite useless... Facebook, Twitter etc. have push notifications so widgets are quite moot... If you use your calendar very often just put it in the dock... And its just a tap away...


Below I am posting some customizations of my iPhone just to stop Wikus' rant on customization...

Below is the current theme I use... With the time and weather and humidity and wind speed in my city...

My lockscreen with the Flashlight and the Calendar... Just hit the power button and flashlight is a tap away also I can just tap on that calendar for a list of events with the phone getting unlocked... Also I have disabled the slide to unlock and set a gesture... So my phone is secure from prying eyes and fiddlers without the annoying password...

Even on the lock screen I just shake my phone and the dialler pops out... I can make a call without unlocking the phone...

I just tap that button on the top of my home page and it shuts down all running apps to free up memory...

.


There's my custom keyboard...

I just swipe the status bar (locked or unlocked) and I get these toggles for various functions... Airplane mode, bluetooth toggle, wifi toggle, 3G toggle, data toggle, brightness toggle, freeing up memory toggle, reboot (which lets me reboot / power off / startup in safe mode) and a respring the springboard...!

You have anything else to talk about customization...?


edit: Oh and I forgot to mention the file manager... Which also launches a webserver... Which enables me to tap into the phone by entering an IP address in the web browser of my laptop via wifi...

 

[uknowimright]

that looks terrible, worse than touchwiz

problem with your argument is that you had to jailbreak your phone, many customizations in Android don't require you to root your phone, basically all you really do is download an app and make it default

 

[KnightWRX]

Like I said, if you use GCD, the speed up is automatic. It's not rocket science. The internals look optimized for asynchronous operations over GCD too. So there should be a fair amount of work that can run on multicore already..

Like I said, it's not so automatic as you think. There are quite a number of issues to asynchronous processing that you need to think about and design for.

Not to mention not everything about GCD is about speed up. dispatch_sync() or using dispatch_async() on the main queue (which is possible) won't result in parallele processing at all. Then there's all the issues of waiting for a queue to finish processing a block before accessing any data it was processing.

The gains are far from linear and just spreading a bunch of dispatch_create_queue() and dispatch_async() calls in your code won't necessarily bring you great results. Go beyond the marketing material. GCD is much better than POSIX threads but it's still concurrency programming and it still requires a lot of thought and manual interventions to check for locks and other techniques to wait on blocks to finish, etc..

 

[dgreene196]

I still do not get what they have done to be able to be faster with two cores than S3 with 4 cores.

Another thing is that the battery span should be then quite longer, and is not, why??

Basically, the ARM cores used in the S3 are off the shelf A9 cores in a custom SoC (system on chip). Apple has designed a completely custom core that appears to be more advanced than the A9, offering improved performance.

If you're talking about the battery life between the S3 and the iPhone 5, then answer is that the battery in the S3 is substantially bigger. The iPhone 5 battery is slightly bigger than in the iPhone 4S, but Apple's decision to prioritize thinness limited the space available in the phone for a larger battery. So, while the design decisions Apple made (custom chip, unified LTE chip/antenna) offer good battery life in a small package, they could have offered really amazing battery life in a larger form factor.

Hope that helps.

 

[Norad]

And This is how Fandroids talk now about their Samsung Galaxy S3

So what ! We have quad... quad... quad... Quack.. Quack...Quack... Core.

Congratulations And now your a duck.

 

[jrswizzle]

that looks terrible, worse than touchwiz

problem with your argument is that you had to jailbreak your phone, many customizations in Android don't require you to root your phone, basically all you really do is download an app and make it default

But the point was he chose to make it that way, hence rendering the "customization argument" moot.

When jailbreaking is only a 1 click process, it's really not that big of an advantage that Android has some of those customization features without rooting. To fully open up the OS, you still have to root - which is a pain.

AND, there are plenty of things iOS does stock that Android doesn't. A simple backup for instance. Replacing my Nexus 7 was a pain because I had to go back and re-install the apps I had and put them back in their places. Now maybe I missed an app or custom ROM that can do that, but the point is iCloud is built into iOS and it backs up automatically each night (or whenever you plug in your phone and are connected to wifi) by essentially taking a snapshot of my system so I can for instance buy a brand new phone and (depending on internet speed) have it look exactly the way my old one looked in a matter of minutes.

AirPlay is another (I just read an interesting article about a Wifi Alliance equivalent that is being pushed to the GS3 soon) that I use on a regular basis, and has made me much less irritated than some about the new dock change (since I rarely do anything wired anymore).

EDIT: As for simply downloading an app....I'm still waiting for quite a few apps I'd love to use on my Nexus 7 to gain JB support....slow update schedules is one of the huge deterrents for me regarding Android.

And on that note, only an hour and half left until iOS 6

 

[itjw]

Quintessential android user logic:

Lose the UX war: "Specs matter more"

Lose the Benchmark war: "I don't use my phone in a way that needs performance, specs don't really matter"

Find out you may have a better benchmark after all: "Specs matter again... Unless its found after more testing that the iP5 is faster, in which case they don't until the SGS4 hits, then they do again"

Lose the quality materials war: "Samsung will have the SGS4 out by the time my plastic is broken, and my resale is half of the iPhone anyway so I'm not losing as much anyway if it doesn't hold up"

Lose the innovation war: "I'll decide what's innovation and what's not. If its android it's innovation. If its Apple it's just more of the same stuff, radically upgraded and changed, but no, no innovation..."

It's so hilarious I don't WANT them to stop whining. They are so insecure they have to come on a Mac fan site just to hear themselves talk.

Keep up the excuses. It makes me smile

 

[viacavour]

Like I said, it's not so automatic as you think. There are quite a number of issues to asynchronous processing that you need to think about and design for.

Not to mention not everything about GCD is about speed up. dispatch_sync() or using dispatch_async() on the main queue (which is possible) won't result in parallele processing at all. Then there's all the issues of waiting for a queue to finish processing a block before accessing any data it was processing.

The gains are far from linear and just spreading a bunch of dispatch_create_queue() and dispatch_async() calls in your code won't necessarily bring you great results. Go beyond the marketing material. GCD is much better than POSIX threads but it's still concurrency programming and it still requires a lot of thought and manual interventions to check for locks and other techniques to wait on blocks to finish, etc..

When an app uses GCD, it means there are already concurrency issues to deal with. Plus the internals use them anyway.

A developer can try to use dispatch_sync throughout. Then again it's much easier to just use global locks to avoid all the reference counting subtleties if the dude just want to serialize everything. dispatch_sync won't be the main scenario for a GCD app.

As long as they use dispatch_async, the OS will schedule it to a core to run. A ton of stuff is already using async model in iOS, like CoreAnimation, CoreMedia and such.

That is why there should be speed up when scaling to more cores. Apple has been preaching and using this approach since a few years ago. It is not simply a matter of "I also have this API"

iOS also doesn't seem to waste a dedicated core for tasks like rendering. It's all managed via threaded software it seems.

 

[linux2mac]

I would expect no less from Apple as they continue to raise the bar by making the best working products as well as the best looking while the competition's only response is mass produced, cheap, copies of Apple devices.

 

[Atlantico]

This thread makes me weep for humanity. Sunspider is a single-threaded, synthetic benchmark that is affected first and foremost by how well the browser's javascript engine is tuned to cheat on it. Internet Explorer has the best Sunspider scores on the desktop, are we all going to declare it the best browser because of that? Sunspider has no relation to scrolling speed or smoothness or even page rendering times (unless your page is 99% javascript, I suppose). It is only useful when comparing either a) the same browser on different hardware or b) different browsers on the same hardware. Even then, all you're comparing is Sunspider scores, that's it. It doesn't really mean anything, and starting a flame war over it is asinine.

Precisely, it's like people don't realize what they're arguing over. This benchmark is incredibly irrelevant unless one could run Safari on all platforms.

On the Mac, the Javascript engine on Chrome is a generation better and more reliable than the one on Safari.

That doesn't mean the Mac is better than the Mac. The amount of idiocy and nauseating fanboi-ism in this thread is quite epic.

If the average age of posters here exceeds 15 years ... that would be extremely funny!!

 

[mdelvecchio]

Oh, really? Worst phone ever? I already heard that when iPhone 4S came out. But reviews are the opposite.

please check your sarcasm detector. appears on the fritz.

 

[aristotle]

Benchmarks dont make it or break it, especially since the last article Macrumors wrote got debunked by users posting higher benchmarks than Macrumors posted in the Samsung SIII comparison, thereby beating the iPhone 5.

Wake me up when Apple has a clue about customization and then I'll consider using an iOS based device.

LOL. Thanks for the laughs. You never disappoint.

It's a "phone" and a "smart phone" so the main things that people would "use" it for are "communicating" with other "people" and running apps and games. None of that activity requires you to endlessly customize your phone.

You can change the lockscreen, the homescreen backgrounds, the ringer, the alert sounds, how and if notifications appear for each app including whether or not it can use a sound to alert you and how/if they appear in notification centre.

If you really insist on reducing performance toward android levels then you can always jailbreak it and add useless widgets everywhere but most people are satisfied with the stock iOS.

Perhaps if you were more friendly then you would have more friends and you could actually use your phone to "communicate" with real people instead of playing with it by constantly "customizing" it.

I used to be a member of the theming community on windows back in the XP days on sites like Aqua-soft and Customize.org but I don't care about that crap anymore. I also briefly worked on themes the iPhone/iPod Touch back in the 1.3 days on macthemes but again, I lost interest in theming/jailbreaks once I could customize enough on the stock iOS.

 

[viacavour]

I would expect no less from Apple as they continue to raise the bar by making the best working products as well as the best looking while the competition's only response is mass produced, cheap, copies of Apple devices.

Yes. While the UI may look the same, they seem to wrap up the foundation work for the new CPU in iPhone 5. The next few optimization cycles will be interesting for techies.

What amazes me is not just the performance. It's the computing efficiency and highly coordinated moves.

They want to keep the phone size optimal for the entire population. So they jump through all the hoops to make things run fast and faster without compromising battery life, all the way down to the CPU.

Very impressive !

 

[samcraig]

My only comment is different people like/want different things from their phone. That point cannot be argued. Both the iPhone and Samsung GS3 (and I am sure others) are both/all EXCELLENT phones. At the end of the day - it's preference. Benchmarks, etc are all crap in my book because the ONLY thing that matters to me is my personal use case. Not yours. Not millions of people that own one phone vs another. Which company makes more money. And so on.

The whole idea of what phone is the "BEST" is ridiculous and only message board fodder.

LOL. Thanks for the laughs. You never disappoint.

It's a "phone" and a "smart phone" so the main things that people would "use" it for are "communicating" with other "people" and running apps and games. None of that activity requires you to endlessly customize your phone.

You can change the lockscreen, the homescreen backgrounds, the ringer, the alert sounds, how and if notifications appear for each app including whether or not it can use a sound to alert you and how/if they appear in notification centre.

If you really insist on reducing performance toward android levels then you can always jailbreak it and add useless widgets everywhere but most people are satisfied with the stock iOS.

Perhaps if you were more friendly then you would have more friends and you could actually use your phone to "communicate" with real people instead of playing with it by constantly "customizing" it.

I used to be a member of the theming community on windows back in the XP days on sites like Aqua-soft and Customize.org but I don't care about that crap anymore. I also briefly worked on themes the iPhone/iPod Touch back in the 1.3 days on macthemes but again, I lost interest in theming/jailbreaks once I could customize enough on the stock iOS.

 

[Jimmy James]

And what did you use before?
If you say iPhone then you never got over the learning curve and adjusted to a different way of doing things.

I'm interested in Android. However, it's these types of comments that turn me off. I have a lot going on in life right now and even reading Macrumors is a rare pleasure. If it takes the amount of time you're describing to acclimatize to Android, well, I probably won't have that amount of time for a coupe of years. Where would that leave my user experience?

 

[viacavour]

My only comment is different people like/want different things from their phone. That point cannot be argued. Both the iPhone and Samsung GS3 (and I am sure others) are both/all EXCELLENT phones. At the end of the day - it's preference. Benchmarks, etc are all crap in my book because the ONLY thing that matters to me is my personal use case. Not yours. Not millions of people that own one phone vs another. Which company makes more money. And so on.

The whole idea of what phone is the "BEST" is ridiculous and only message board fodder.

Tell that to Samsung please. They are the one who try to compare with iPhone because the latter is the leader.

They even went as far as insulting iPhone users for not caring about their phones. They made their choices but Samsung and friends just refuse to accept it.

 

[Takeo]

Do you oppose CHOICE?

Yes. I do actually. Choice is not all it's cracked up to be. Too much choice leads to hodgepodge and/or indecision.

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Wake me up when Apple has a clue about customization and then I'll consider using an iOS based device.

You do realize that its individuals like YOURSELF that instigate these kinds of 'brand wars' in the forums?

Yup. It's totally not you.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

I'm interested in Android. However, it's these types of comments that turn me off. I have a lot going on in life right now and even reading Macrumors is a rare pleasure. If it takes the amount of time you're describing to acclimatize to Android, well, I probably won't have that amount of time for a coupe of years. Where would that leave my user experience?

I would say the same thing if you jump from Android to iOS. Or windows to OSX. They are different from each other and have a learning curve.
The learning curve is mostly just using it and it takes a few weeks to adjust.

They do things differently and have to learn to adjust to it. I have bit more trouble in iOS now days because of how little I use it. I will try to default to the Android way of doing things and struggle with the change.

Like the lack of a dedicated back button screws me over more way than you can count every time I use it.