Geekbench: the new iPod touch cannot hold a candle to the iPhone 5

Apple’s fifth-generation iPod touch has arrived to some raving reviews, representing a major upgrade over the previous model with the same four-inch display as the iPhone 5 (sans a cheaper assembly), the thinner chassis (only 6.1mm), the new Lightning interconnect, a five-megapixel iSight camera with custom optics and the A5 chip, also found inside the third-generation iPad and iPhone 4S. First Geekbench benchmarks show that the new iPod touch is nearly as fast as the iPhone 4S, but not even half as fast as the iPhone 5, Apple’s first iOS device to utilize the brand new A6 processor

Hitting a Geekbench score of 619, the new iPod touch is a bit slower than the iPhone 4S, which clocked with a score of 654. That’s understandable considering both devices run the A5 chip clocked at 800MHz.

Compared to the previous-generation iPod touch which scored 378 in the Geekbench benchmark, the latest model presents a sound upgrade.

The iPad 3 also has an improved variant of the A5 chip called the A5X. It’s clocked at 1GHz and has twice the RAM (1GB), enabling the device to beat both the new iPod touch and the iPhone 4S with a Geekbench score of 789.

This year’s iPad 2 with its 32nm 1GHz A5 chip also beats the iPod touch, hitting a Geekbench score of 778.


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In fact, the fifth-generation iPod touch is slower than any Apple’s iOS device manufactured in 2011 or 2012.

In case you’ve been wondering, Apple’s media player doesn’t hold a candle to the iPhone 5 and its dual-core A6 chip (with three GPU cores) that dynamically changes its clock frequency from as low as 500MHz to as high as 1.3GHz.

The A6 package is one-fifth smaller than the A5 and is the first Apple-designed chip to deliver the world’s first phone powered by ARM’s Cortex A15 CPU platform. These technological advances enable the iPhone 5 to run circles around any other iOS device, including the new iPod touch.

Just take a look at the chart above: the iPhone 5 scores 1573 in Geekbench tests, meaning it’s nearyl two and a half times faster than the iPod touch.

So, despite the new iPod touch form factor, the A5 chip and other hardware advances, in terms of speed the iPhone 5 is Apple’s fastest iOS device – it’s nearly twice as fast as the third-generation iPad.

And we know from previously that it’s the fastest smartphone out there, if only for a couple weeks or months until the Android camp comes out with new devices packing in the latest chips from Nvidia, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm.