iPhone 5 benchmark: narrowly beats Galaxy S3 [geekbench]

When Apple announced iPhone 5, it had claimed that the A6 chip featured in the new iPhone will furnish up to 2x power and performance. New Geekbench results have now surfaced which show iPhone 5 scoring 1601 in that particular benchmark. Since iPhone 5 hasn’t yet hit the shelves, it is hard to discern whether or not these results are fake or real, but they are plausible. However, what they do reveal is that iPhone 5 beats Samsung Galaxy S3 by a narrow margin. The latter scored 1560 in the test (we suspect that this is the dual-core U.S version of the GS3). The Galaxy S3 with Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) is also said to score above 1700, which is weird for a CPU test…

It is rather interesting that the OS running on a given handset significantly affects Geekbench tests. For instance, while a Galaxy S3 running Ice Cream Sandwich scores lower than iPhone 5, one running Jelly Bean beats the iPhone 5. Most of the Snapdragon S4 handset we tried score in the 15xx range.

The last Apple smartphone, iPhone 4S, scored a bare 631 on these tests which at least affirms Apple’s claim that the new iPhone doubles on the performance of its predecessor, thanks to the A6 processor. However, the new iPad is the Apple device which has scored highest on these tests. So the A6 chip puts iPhone 5 squarely between iPhone 4S and the new iPad in terms of its score on Geekbench, and that’s probably because the iPad gen 3 can manage higher frequencies and has better cooling capabilities.

Update: our own test with an AT&T Galaxy S3 (dual-core Snapdragon) yielded a score of 1465. We don’t have a quad-core version on hand, but feel free to post your score in the comments.

Salman Latif
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: Apple Inc, Galaxy S3, iPhone, iPhone 5