AnTuTu, a company responsible for the development of the AnTuTu benchmark app which we (along with many other reviewers) use when reviewing phones, publishes their annual Performance Ranking Report ranking the 10 best smartphones of that particular year.
Before v6.0 of the app, the report only consisted of Android phones. With this new version, though, 2015’s report is the first cross-platform ranking report and my goodness was it an interesting one. While we weren’t that surprised that the iPhone 6s Plus was #1 on their list, we were shocked at how MUCH further it was from the competition. Let me give you a hint: 132k.
According to the popular cross-platform benchmarker, the average score of an iPhone 6s Plus is 132,620 points, the only device to break the 100k mark in 2015.
On paper, this gap doesn’t seem possible as the iPhone 6s Plus is powered by a dual-core Twister A9 chip that is clocked at a tame 1.84GHz and a PowerVR GT7600 GPU paired with (a frankly depressing) 2GB of RAM. Comparatively, the second placed Huawei Mate 8 packs a monstrous next-gen octa-core Kirin 950 SoC — four Cortex A72 CPU cores clocked at 2.3GHz, four Cortex A53 CPU cores clocked at 1.8GHz and a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU — plus 4GB of RAM.
Yet somehow the iPhone 6s Plus outperforms it by about 30%. It is worth noting that the top 3 performing phones all run on full HD displays so they have less pixels to push compared to their Quad-HD competitors.
As we move down the ladder, we find the Samsung Exynos 7420 chipsets occupying places three to five with the Meizu PRO 5 leading the pack. Not surprising since it only runs a 1080p full-HD display opposed to the Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+‘s Quad-HD display.
Just after the Samsung chips comes 2014’s iPhone 6 Plus, scoring a respectable 80,554 average score. Not bad for a 2014 phone especially if you take a look at the phones below it. Yup, in case you didn’t notice it yet we have not come across a single Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chip yet.
Coming in at 7th is the first and best-performing Snapdragon 810 smartphone, the OnePlus 2. A “2016 flagship killer” got killed by a phone from 2014. Oops. Scoring an average just shy of 80,000 the OnePlus 2 edges just ahead of the Letv Le 1 Pro, Xiaomi Mi Note Pro while Google’s Nexus 6P rounds out the 10.
I guess it REALLY isn’t about how much horsepower you have, it’s about how you use it. However, it is worth noting that these are average scores so the number of benchmarks ran as well as the conditions in which these benchmarks were run should also factor into the results. That said, I don’t think anything short of a nuclear war could stop the iPhone 6s Plus from running away with the crown.
