The iPhone 5 is shaping up to be a performance monster, if early benchmark results are to be believed -- the phone's first score indicates it packs more than twice the processing power of its predecessor, our sister site CNET News reports.
The Geekbench test result surfaced earlier this week and pegs the iPhone 5's new A6 processor as posting a healthy 1,601 in the test, where higher numbers are better.
The dual-core chip lurking inside Apple's new toy appear to trounce the scores achieved by its predecessor -- I just ran the Geekbench test on an iPhone 4S and achieved a score of 633.
That would see performance more than doubling since Apple's last effort, which was itself one of the more powerful mobiles out there. I've never experienced much slowdown running any app on the iPhone 4S (except perhaps when editing a substantial iMovie video), so I'm excited to see how the iPhone 5 performs in our barrage of benchmark tests.
But does it beat the Galaxy S3?
The iPhone 5's Geekbench score doesn't look to be quite as high as that of Samsung's quad-core Galaxy S3 however, which according to this list of results claims a face-melting score of 1,728. Yikes.
Just now we ran the Geekbench test on a rooted Galaxy S3 and achieved a score of 1,299, which tells me that before we know for sure which mobile is more powerful, we'll need to run a whole suite of side-by-side tests. We'll be doing just that very shortly, so stay tuned.
Are you considering buying an iPhone 5? Or is £529 just too much cash to throw Apple's way? Tell me in the comments or on our Facebook wall.


Comments 14
Add your comment
anonymous 18 September, 2012 10:55
So this puts the iPhone 5 in 3rd place.. Me thinks that this nothing to shout about really!
anonymous 18 September, 2012 12:32
Doesn't matter how fast or how much power you have, it's what you do with it that counts, i.e. apps, software etc.
anonymous 18 September, 2012 12:33
Why is there such a difference between your geekbench result and the one on the site? 1736 v 1299??
bregor 18 September, 2012 12:40
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1046523
HTC One X = 1634.
anonymous 18 September, 2012 12:55
Twice as fast as 4s bit still not as fast as competition, step up apple!
anonymous 18 September, 2012 13:00
"Twice as fast as 4s bit still not as fast as competition, step up apple!"
That would mean giving money to R&D instead of the lawyers. Can't have that now, can we?
anonymous 18 September, 2012 13:25
@anonymous 13:00 the competition is getting away ! Can't have that now, can we.
Tough s@#t
damien2501 18 September, 2012 13:58
iOS doesn't use loads of resources all the time so even with half the spec it can be twice as fast. Android is a mess of code and edited updates bolted on lazily it's a slow mess that needs a quad core processor just to tick over.
anonymous 18 September, 2012 14:08
@damien2501 Well said! iOS is crapple at multitasking!
anonymous 18 September, 2012 14:31
@anonymous 14:08 ios is crapple at multitasking! I didnt know that even more reason not to get iphone 5
anonymous 18 September, 2012 15:11
You have to ignore "damien2501", he is cnet's resident fanatic isheep and android hater. At least it keeps him off the streets shouting at people/clouds/imaginary dinosaurs/fringe events
anonymous 18 September, 2012 15:25
@anonymous 15:11 love the coment just love it and its so true
Lmfao
Ruffus Stone 18 September, 2012 15:57
Considering the previously considered fast speeds of the last generation of top end smartphones, anything over 1000 is going to be blazingly fast to most people.
You'd be hard pressed to notice much, if any difference between any of those phones based on one particular test and of course it depends on what activity or app is being processed at any particular time.
I'm sure in certain circumstances a phone with a lower Geekbench score might well be faster than a phone with a higher score.
It's like the quad core versus dual core argument. Most of the time, the quad core is only using two cores.
.
Mark Anderson 18 September, 2012 16:18
Apple have done well with their new chip - they key thing is that it runs at 1Ghz, not 1.5GHz and nearly matches the dual core variant of the SGS III on Jelly Bean. That's pretty good from a power usage point of view.
I'll be interested to see how the Lumia 920 copes with the same chip as the SGS III given WP8 will probably be a bit more efficient than Android JB.