Just exactly how fast is the A6

I wonder if I'm the only one who has ever thought about this before but I'm wondering what the chips apple puts in their IOS devices are equivalent to in power to a Macbook or iMac. Could the A6 be similar to the intel i3 processor or the A5 to the intel Core 2 Duo? Just a thought anyone have any ideas?

MacAddict. said:

I wonder if I'm the only one who has ever thought about this before but I'm wondering what the chips apple puts in their IOS devices are equivalent to in power to a Macbook or iMac. Could the A6 be similar to the intel i3 processor or the A5 to the intel Core 2 Duo? Just a thought anyone have any ideas?

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Nope...you're not the 1st person to think about this.

As you may know...Everymac.com using the benchmarking program "Geekbench" to test the performance of Macintosh computers. There must also be a "Geekbench" version for iOS devices...since Everymac.com has Geekbench scores for iPhones, iPads, etc.

So...for example...a 2012 15" retina MacBook Pro i7 2.7ghz has a Geekbench score of 12,203...and an iPad 3 has a Geekbench score of 756.

For more details Go to:

EveryMac.com

HTH,

- Nick

Not sure about how it compares to computer hardware but here is a performance preview from Anandtech where it wipes the floor with everything out there.

AnandTech - The iPhone 5 Performance Preview

Yeah...the Geekbench score comparison may not be the best...maybe better than nothing.

The "overhead" in a computer is certainly more than an iOS device...thus the processing power in an iOS device doesn't need to be as great. So the "speed" experience from the user standpoint is very important (snappy is snappy) regardless of the benchmark score.

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

Yeah...the Geekbench score comparison may not be the best...maybe better than nothing.

- Nick

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That is true. It's really hard to compare with computer hardware but more and more tests are coming out for the mobile devices. One thing that caught my eye was the iPhone 5's A6 according to another Anandtech article is the first Device CPU that keeps up on SunSpider with a good Intel Atom, so that is progress at least!

Remember also that the iPhone processors are ARM while the Macs are Intel based. Being entirely different architectures, the raw MHz number don't equate one to one. Additionally, iOS is a embedded OS and works differently than OS X. So, performance is hard to compare..

Roughly speaking, the A6 is the processing equivalent of the 2003 Power Mac G5s.

https://twitter.com/d_castillo/statuses/248271970771279873

That's right ... you are walking around with the equivalent of a professional-level workstation from 10 years ago in your pocket.