The “Bionic” part in the name of Apple’s A11 Bionic chip isn’t just marketing speak. It’s the most powerful processor ever put in a mobile phone. We’ve put this chip to the test in both synthetic benchmarks and some real-world speed trials, and it obliterates every Android phone we tested.
As far as SoCs go, Apple is incredibly far ahead of Qualcomm and Samsung. These companies have some serious soul-searching to do.
I can’t wait for AnandTech to dive into the A11 Bionic, so we can get some more details than just people comparing GeekBench scores.
I agree they’re making good leaps, but remember that that this is a ^Alb700 phone. ^Alb700!
If we rated performance vs cost it doesn’t seem quite so rosy.
(Also, typo in the summary– ‘Serous’)
^Alb700 is what prevents the iphone from being the future, the future is here but only for a select few. All this power seems wasted on a phone.
I could have bought 10-12 of the laptops I am using now (Dell Lattitude e5400)
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=…
Edited 2017-09-24 10:58 UTC
The note is the same price (or more) the Pixel is close to the same price the new Essential phone too.
Funny that people don^aEURTMt say the same about price when it comes to Samsung, Google etc. (especially when it^aEURTMs all the same Android and you can get Android phones with a lot of the same features and same software for half the price)
Yeah, but is this only ever going to be in a phone? I think its obviously going to be in the next iPad. Now is it over kill in the ipad? Well, apparently some people like Thom are starting to use it instead of a notebook. So a chip as powerfull as a notebook inside a notebook replacement, doesn’t sound as crazy.
Also, worth keeping in mind the future direction of phones that Apple has in mind things like Augmented Realtiy. That will burn through some cpu/gpu cycles, i think.
The two Samsung phones benchmarked against the iPhones are also similarly priced, or more. The Note 8 is supposedly around the US$1000 mark. Phone prices are getting ridiculous!
I couldn’t agree more! It is absolutely crazy – they have entered or surpassed the laptop pricing. I can do so much more (useful things) on a laptop, and normally not bound to only one OS vendor that will artificially force me to upgrade or brand my hardware as obsolete in a year’s time.
I’m still using a Google Nexus 4 which has received every Android update since it’s release in 2012 (until this year) and my phone still runs every app under the sun just fine. All that for a fraction of what a Apple or Samsung phone costs.
On the bright side of things, I can actually use my Note 8 as a desktop system with the Dex Station (though for the love of god, why can’t I use Firefox? It gives me an error about ‘being made for phone touch screens)
Nexus 4 started out on Jelly Bean and received KitKat and Lollipop (5.0-5.1). All others are unofficial ports that no regular user should or could install on their phone.
Edited 2017-09-24 18:49 UTC
Correct, and official Google updates for Nexus4 only stopped this year. That’s pretty darn impressive.
Then there is also the fact that you can install other phone OSes on a Nexus, like the Ubuntu Phone OS. I actually tried that out back in 2013 I think it was, but then switched back to Android after a week or two.
Also, with the Nexus, I can install any version of Android that was supported for the phone. eg: just recently I reverted back to Android 4.4.4 as I liked that one the most and and the least annoyances. Try that with an Apple product. I simply hate that “artificial limitations” that Apple and other companies push. Google seems to be the exception here – at least as far as my Nexus4 is concerned.
The last official maintenance release was 5.1.1 in early August 2015.
The last major update was 5.0 (since 5.0 and 5.1 are considered “Lollipop”) in Nov 2014.
No idea where you get that they stopped supporting it this year.
Yes it’s nice you can unlock the phone and install other operating systems on it. But this is useless to regular users.
Edited 2017-09-25 03:07 UTC
Nexus4 is stuck on 5.1. Not very impressive. So they released in November 2012 and stopped supporting new Android as of 6.0 or Oct 2015. Less than 3 years of support with new major versions of Android. And as you said, even Android 5.1 was a step back for the Nexus, with significantly worse battery life (I know, my wife has one). So really, good support ended with Android 5, or only 2 years into the Nexus 4’s life.
Meanwhile the iPhone 5 was released in September 2012 and was fully supported until just now (iOS11 is not compatible). That is 5 years of support.
Considering that Android 5.x came with a ton of extra visual pizzaz compared to 4.x, it doesn’t surprise me that battery life took a hit.
Which reinforces the point: Upgrades for lots of years are not important, security updates are.
Although some of the early “poor Nexus 4 battery life” reports were caused by the fact that upgrading from Android 4.x to Android 5.x meant that Android 5.x had to AOT-compile all the dalvik apps on the phone.
Anyway, bought the little Nexus 4 used with 5.1 installed, I have no complaints about battery life or performance.
Edited 2017-09-25 21:47 UTC
Ongoing monetary inflation, trust me, is going to get worst. Also bleeding edge technology is expensive and early adopters drive the price down. Same thing happened with corning glass, memory and other technologies pushed by Apple (and others).
On a side note my iPhone 5s died (my fault) and right now I cannot afford a new iPhone so I had to buy a cheap Xperia in the mean time.
My current Android phone (less than a year old) cost me ~$50. My wife’s new Android cost around ~70.
These aren’t monster phones but more than enough for what we use them for (phone, web, youtube, messaging etc).
Nonsense. I can walk into Walmart and get a perfectly good Android phone for $100 (CAD) https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/acer-liquid-zest-5-3g-smartphone/600019…
Or even less on Amazon. If you want the highest of the high end you will pay for it, but smartphone technology is cheaper than ever. My current iPhone 5S I bought for $80 used. Will probably replace with an SE soon.
Yeah, I think there is a lot of value in getting an old iphone that still gets security updates. Android not as much, if you care about other people reading your messages, data on the device, or browsing habits.
Most people don’t, and the threat for most people is theoretical, so I get why they don’t really care. They will care if malware becomes more of an issue on phones. The recent bluetooth issue sounds pretty bad. But again, you’d need to care about your data/privacy in the first place.
I think he was talking about high-end phones
Right. And there it is not insane either. We can see from this benchmark that the iPhone 8 has a chip that can outperform some mid-range laptops. So is it really so surprising that it is starting to approach laptop prices? The money doesn’t go to the extra plastic required to make a bigger device.
Exactly. Apple’s plan with the A11 wasn’t to rival a mid-range phone’s performance per dollar. It was about being a lot faster than Android phones in the same price range by a good margin and basically put Exynos and Snapdragon to shame.
Edited 2017-09-25 21:19 UTC
Complaining that high-end phones are expensive would be even more ridiculous.
Yeah, I hear ya dude. The phones that it was benchmarked against would never be anywhere NEAR my ‘must buy’ list.
I’m really comparing it to some of the offerings from Xiaomi, ZTE, Lenovo and so on. I’d never spend $900+ on a phone, but if I did, I’d choose the iPhone out of the options in that price range.
Absolutely nothing against Apple, but they’re just out of my bracket and not aimed at me.
This is true for any new technology.
The newest Intel i9 chips is about $2,000 just for one CPU. Where if you get the previous generation of the i7 chips you get more power per price.
There is also the issue of Price/lifespan of a product. If you get an iPhone 7 for $650 and you figure there is 4 years of support so that is 162.50 a year of usage. While the iPhone 8 for $700 will give you 5 years of support that is $140 a year.
Granted there are also cheaper devices which will give you long term support. But right now Apple has the premium product. Later this year Samsung will probably have it, then Apple again.
I don’t know about pounds, but an iPhone and a Samsung flagship cost about equal in the states if you buy them outright. I’m not counting carrier subsidies or lease agreements. What’s the situation in the rest of the world? Note I’m comparing flagship to flagship, not the sub-$100 Android phones.
Many Android flagships out there are a ^Alb700 phone. ^Alb700! Yet they have a weaker chip.
Qualcomm is enjoying their monopoly in high-performance Android SoCs and doesn’t want to put in the R&D dollars to catch Intel.. Manufacturers can’t use Exynos because it is from a rival OEM (and even those chips have just the reference implementation from ARM anyway). Intel is out of the picture because of ARM-only native apps. Which leaves out Mediate.. bahaha.
It’s Qualcomm or nothing for flagship phones, and Qualcomm knows this.
Did Anandtech ever get around to writing their promised deep dive on A10 / Hurricane last year? I think they^aEURTMve kind of stopped doing comprehensive deep-dives on Apple stuff since Anand left…
So for all that added expense, people will be able to enjoy better Twitter’ing, Facebook’ing, Snapchat’ing, MapQuest’ing, and so on then…right?
Oh, and they can brag about having the fastest cellphone out for now.
They are just collecting benchmark points for “special” CPU instructions for Artificial intelligence (deep learning) ie something like MMX or SSE in Intel compatible CPUs. It has nothing to do with real life… they just cheating. It is what GPU does without it’s 3D part (vector and matrix operations). It’s expensive to ask GPU chipmakers to create/support this extensions so Google, IBM and others did own “bionic” chips. You may do faster image/video/sound analyzing with it. It’s like special CPU instructions for cryptography few years ago.
I find it difficult to believe that Apple has a higher IPC than Intel. Are there benchmarks of real applications doing the same thing on both platforms where you can see this?
It’s not only CPU here. They’re using both CPU and GPU combined in most tasks (especially encoding and video editing).
AMD has been talking about this for almost 10 years (since they bought ATI actually).. Until now only Apple seems to have taken this seriously.
I think the previous poster is referring to single core performance, in which Apple’s case if fantastic.
The ones pushing hard for GPU-acceleration were NVIDIA, initially. But now just about any mobile SoC/OS combination does a lot of heavy lifting on the app specific IPs, not just the core.
No, that’s cool, I really mean it, with that power under the hood, they’ll now be able to send mms and do (proper) multitasking. And even display flash animations without lags.
For a device that stays 90% of the time idle and whose purposed usage is phoning (which the 3310 was capable of too), that sure is needed processing power. Could it run a Java version of Excel ?
Old man is confused by new technology and decides to yell at clouds. News at 11…
Not even close to the truth… More like someone that actually get technology – trying to use a handheld device as a technological hub is simply stupid. And the solution to avoiding that stupid is already well known and could be supported by Apple or Samsung if they wanted to.
Instead we get a world adapting to that handheld form factor with the result that real work (and some types of fun too) is crippled by the physical limitations of something that should be mostly a communications device. I’ve stopped using a number of sites as everything there is dumbed down – and not conditionally for handheld devices.
I have a phone from 2008 that does browsing, video playback and even some apps (not 3D games though). It supports SMS, MMS, telephone calls and a shitload of propriatary messaging systems. And that device could do a lot more if it weren’t for the stagnation of system design we see today.
One of the hardest thing for a lot of people to realize when changing technology, they need to change how they use it. If you try to use a tablet or your phone like a Laptop then you will be disappointed. If you are one of these new kids, and are use to using a tablet, trying to use a laptop like a tablet is equally disappointing.
For me if I could do software development on a tablet and have a keyboard (which most you can do now) I would be rather happy replacing my laptop.
> For me if I could do software development on a tablet and have a keyboard (which most you can do now) I would be rather happy replacing my laptop.
Get Termux. Its eventual goal is to be able to turn non-rooted Android into a system capable of doing full Android app dev.
Actually what you and the previous commenter are displaying is a lack of understanding of what computing actually is.
It’s very common for some people to get too caught up with the implementation details of an idea, to the point they miss the concept itself. This is, you’re confusing the version of computing you are used to interact with, as it being how computing should be done, or the only proper way to do it.
For a person who has grown using mobile devices and with pervasive connectivity, your idea of how a computing device that acts as a media hub should look like, and behave, would look asininely outdated. For example.
It may on some benchmarks. But not all the Deskop/Server CPU is designed to perform different tasks. Tradeoffs have been made, There are some features that you just do on a phone, which allows more die space to make the features work better.
The tests don’t perform anything remotely similar on different platforms. You can’t even compare Android and iOS numbers. The numbers are only usable within a specific platform.
It’s really great to see RISC side of things getting some love by Apple and making its custom be a real killer.
The competition could bury them if they’d just make all other mobile systems an open standard that will be followed (Much like IBM PCs) so that Android could just be updated much like regular OSes and have real long term support… but that’s a whole different topic.
The one in the iPhone X is even faster supposedly, and I can certainly imagine that Apple is salivating at the future when they can have chips that match Intel in performance made by them that can run all of their OSes. This can only mean better prices in the end and kicking Intel in the butt to get to innovating.
Between AMD on the desktop/server and ARM on mobile, Intel is having a bad time.
… can it make phone calls?
I understand the desire for Phastest Phone Epher!!, but what is the actual benefit for the phone and the user?
Do we need a faster facebook or twitter? Will push notifications be faster?
It’s certainly going to drain the battery faster, unless it spends most of the time idling at a speed easily matched by an iPhone 3.
Apple doesn’t make a phone you want to buy. And you think anybody cares? Nothing is gained from reading your comment.
Don’t just vote me down and not comment. I didn’t do that to the complainer so why do it to me. If you found value in his comment; tell me what it is.
Providing some actual insight on the reasoning of a growing part of the “smartphone” market unlike your off-topic complaint?
And you don’t get to tell others how to behave here or elsewhere.
Ok here is your insight
Just look at the benchmarks. Most newer phones use less energy to do the same as older models.
I just thought you already knew this…
Newer chip layouts, with smaller traces, can indeed reduce power consumption and increase speed. On the other hand, the new Ryzen Threadripper chips can draw up to 180W TDP, so newer technology does not guarantee efficiency.
As long as the laws of thermodynamics are in play, typically, more transistors and more circuits means more energy consumed. You can gain most of that back with good thermal characteristics, improved die design, and smaller traces– but it’s still diminishing returns.
Now, if you REALLY want efficiency, use dedicated hardware that’s designed to process data as efficiently as possible. As I mention elsewhere, a Raspberry Pi can decode 1080P because it has a dedicated decoder chip– without that chip, the Pi would be hard pressed to decode *any* reasonable quality video stream, because it’s much, much harder to do such things on a general purpose CPU than it is on a hardware based decoder.
It seems that all this extra power is for 4K video.
Can your iPhone 3 do real time 4K@60fps encoding/decoding/rendering? probably not.
Obviously if you don’t do that stuff then you don’t need a device with this power especially if all you do is make phone calls.
I do shoot 4K video on my DSLR and I know how much CPU power rendering takes even on a 12Core XEON system.
Apple is investing a lot of money in the guts of their devices. I’m sure that there is a lot more to come.
It seems fairly obvious that they are trying to reduce their dependency on 3rd parties (eg Qualcomm) for their products.
The work they are doing will spur other SOC vendors to up their game so it will in time benefit Android users.
So, even if you really loathe Apple you should at least tip your hat to the work they are doing on their SOC’s.
There’s also a heavy push for VR and AR on mobile platforms. Lots of AI (image/shape identification, etc) is being done at the device level. Which requires a lot of heavy lifting.
Ok, that’s a valid reason. Although I think that might be better served by custom hardware rather than ramping up a general purpose CPU to achieve the same effect (much as hardware encoding is superior to software encoding), I understand the standards, and therefore the HW processing units aren’t ready for prime time.
There’s custom HW in those chips for those applications. Lots of DSP, custom IP blocks in there.
They’re called SoC (System on a Chip) for a reason.
No (and I don’t have an iPhone 3, either, I have a Pixel), but using a smart phone to replace either a DSLR or a 4K video camera seems a bit goofy. Unless the “liquid lens” technology that was touted a few years ago happens, I don’t see smartphones competing with any of the standard DSLR lens… The F1.8/50mm, my F2.0 100mm macro, or a 70-200mm.
As for 4k video, my Pixel can already shoot / play at 30fps, but if you’re serious about 4K video, you won’t be doing it on a smartphone.
Ultimately, that’s best served by dedicated hardware encoders that can handle 60 frames-per-second at 8.3 million pixels each– with the right HW decoder, a Raspberry Pi can play back 1080P with no frames dropped.
Doing that with a general purpose CPU again, seems inefficient.
A DSL can’t fit in your pocket.
A phone camera is not a replacement for a professional video solution, but this is for consumer applications. The phone is basically a good enough camera for 99% of the population.
It’s not good in night shots, but most people can’t drag a DSLR around anyway so they have no choice anyway, hence the market for as-good-as-it-gets phone cameras.
Edited 2017-09-26 09:06 UTC
Indeed. There’s also something equally important; most people don’t know how to operate a DLSR camera, but they can push a button in their phone to take a photo which will be “good enough” for most of their intents and purposes. Same for video.
Another thing is that there is significantly more R&D money being put in the development of imaging sensors for mobile devices than DSLRs. People tend to underestimate consumer tech IC curves.
Well, that should be a lesson– never mock the iPhone press release.
You get down-voted into oblivion, with approximately two useful replies.
The lack of transparency, diversity and homogeneity in benchmarking mobile platforms makes these articles and their conclusions dubious at best.
GeekBench has always been heavily criticised and should not be used to make any valid conclusion.
When a benchmark points at a mobile phone SOC being faster than Intel’s i5 CPU, one can either *believe* in everything Apple, or one can do some proper journalism and bring a healthy dose of skepticism.
I long for a decent set of benchmark tools and procedures when benchmarking mobile CPUs like we see with Intel and AMD products. For some reason, when it comes to mobile CPUs, the press seems content with running a couple of glorified demos and the odd webbrowser JavaScripts performance test (while making sure no two platforms use the same browser).
Cause so far, I still have no palatable understanding of mobile performance characteristics. Whereas I know what I can realistically expect of an Intel or AMD CPU in a large palette of practical applications.
There is none. So… They can inevitably say ‘fastest iPhone ever’ and it’ll be true. No one can actually say ‘fastest phone ever’ and have it be true because the operating system is a huge chunk of how fast a phone is. If you could install Android on an iPhone or iOS on an Android phone, then run the benchmarks to see which is faster it’d work. But since you can’t really do that…
Only phone benchmarks that probably matter would be ones where they see how many applications are instant to load (which from what I saw the Note 8 trounces everything because (surprise!) it has 6GB of RAM. The only other one I could see is how well a phone captures video, or edits, or you know.. ACTUAL application usage. And even then they should state ‘iPhone # w/iOS ## is faster/slower than ‘Android model Whatever using Android delicious desert name.’
By the way, I’ve NEVER seen a video that compares such things.
These kinds of videos are all over Youtube. For now, they are as close as we are going to get to “real-world tests”. But I think you new that already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-2B82B1mg
The results are basically the same as the benchmarks suggests. And has been for a couple of years now. iPhones are faster in most of the tests. Even older iPhones are faster than newer Android flagships in many tests. As the iPhone is here.
And all of this even though Android flagships have SOC’s with more cores, more “gigahertz” and in some cases double the memory (3Gb vs 6Gb).
It really is quite embarrassing.
The export of the 4K video is a particularly illuminating example of a “real-world usecase”.
Any technology enthusiast arguing that more speed on mobile devices “isn’t really needed” is lying to themselves because they just can’t bear that Apple is two generations ahead in this regard compared to their own favourite brand of Android smartphone.
Actually that is honestly the first video I’ve seen where someone does that! All the other ones I’ve seen are the dumb ‘how fast does this application that I just had open re-open.’ type of test. As if people continuously open and close applications.
And to be fair, most of that ‘review’ is still ‘opening and closing of programs’.
Edited 2017-09-25 07:16 UTC
You get five times higher numbers if you pretend to a mobile device when running geekbench. The numbers CANNOT be compared cross platforms. You can’t even compare Android and iOS number
much more detailed oriented than thought.
Edited 2017-09-24 11:48 UTC
It is the machine learning that Apple is investing a lots of effort lately. Augmented reality uses it a lot to figure out the surrounding environment. Also face detection and more and more OS fancy features will depend on it. So Apple needs a beefy CPU to keep all the neural networking stuff afloat that is happening inside the phone away from users sight.
Lets also not forget that all of this power helps keeps the phone motoring along for longer.
When the current gen of smart phones started, replacing the handset after a year or two was the norm as the device ran so slowly with apps and software updates. Which reminds me of when notebooks (not laptops) started in to pick up in the late 90’s, these devices would need replacing every one or two years as they grew so sluggish. However by about 2005/2006 when we hit the Core Duo processors the need to continually replace laptops started to get much longer 4 – 5 years.
Phone have simply caught up to this, an iPhone 6 will easily keep you in good stead and that was released in 2014, youll get all the updates that are coming from apple and still have a responsive phone.
I expect the iPhone 8 to last me at least 4 years when i purchase one later in the year.
Of course the computing power as others have mentioned will go into 4K shooting, editing and exporting as well as VR and AR.
I dont have a 4K monitor or tv however when i do upgrade i will shoot everything in 4K/60fps (currently shoot 1080p/60fps) as i much prefer the high FPS and would like to future proof my video for when i do jump into 4K.
So none of this has anything to do with being faster than other SOC’s and hence the name is pure marketing. Even Apple said as much “We don’t want our chips to just be a meaningless incrementing number that people will forget. When we added Fusion to our A10 people really responded positively so we wanted to add something similar to our next SOC” (quoted from memory)
Is the A11 chip fast? YES, both CPU and GPU
Is that needed/wanted for a phone? Probably only when it comes to games and camera functionality in which the iPhone is indeed doing a lot of heavy processing (computational photography, 6o fps 4K)
Will it hurt or benefit batterlife? A faster SOC should do the same work in less time so should spend it’s time in low power standby a higher percentage of time, resulting in better battery life. Also, new SOC’s are always touted to be faster and more energy efficient…yet it doesn’t seem that the iPhone has improved battery life in any meaningful way.
Will a faster SOC speed up everything? No, if getting data is the bottleneck a faster SOC will not speed this up. iPhones are known to always be a generation behind of the latest-and-greatest network technologies and it seems this time is no different (500 mbps max vs 1000 mbps max on some Android devices)
Can anyone explain how the 8 and 8Plus have the same CPU/GPU but the 8Plus gets higher scores although it has to push a lot more pixels on the screen? Does any of these tests account for any resolution difference between devices (iPhones have relatively low resolution screens)
I do agree with most people here that the speed of the SOC now seems to be far above what is needed for normal use. “More is better”, but for the general smoothness of the OS we reached a point of “good enough” about 3 years ago in the high-end and that has trickled down to all levels since last year. Even if you buy a 150 dollar Android phone now, the OS will react fast enough not to notice.
Here is a great way to “reverse-benchmark” an unknown device: Use it for a bit without seeing the device, try to guess the specs based on your experience
The benchmarks are fake.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/25/iphone-8-fake-benchmark-results/
That’s an article from April this year. It has no relation to actual benchmarks scores made now that the iPhone 8 is out.
Please, don’t scream FAKE NEWS willy-nilly. We have a president for that.
TFA: Apple made the world’s fastest phone.
Reasonable responses:
Neat! Technology keeps getting better!
Wow, that’s really fast.
That’s almost as fast as the computer I’m working on!
Actual responses:
These balanced, well-regarded benchmarks are all lies. Lies, I tell you!
How dare cutting-edge technology be expensive!
Since I don’t need a phone that fast, NOBODY needs a phone that fast.
I bet it doesn’t run full speed all the time.
Get off my lawn, you kids!
So you think the benchmark is correct that the phone is faster than a Mac Pro?
Seriously?
Dude, you’re on OSAlert. Those reasonable response are the kind of thing your grandparents would say.
Deep diving into the cost benefit and the technology are to be expected here.
Am I the only Android user that can do 10x maybe 20x times as much on their phone than their Apple loving comrades?
Sometimes “fast” doesn’t matter.
It’s a “Apples” to oranges… and I like the oranges.
So you can twiddle your thumbs (or other appendages) in more useless apps! Who cares. I have yet to see a droid app that does not exist on an iPhone that I need or want.