iPhone 8 is the world’s fastest phone, obliterates every Android phone out there

iPhone 8 is here and it’s the world’s fastest phone in terms of both synthetic benchmarks and heavy duty real-world tasks, as tested by hardware experts over at Tom’s Guide.

“To put it simply, the iPhone 8 line has a MacBook Pro Intel-level processor inside,” wrote author Mark Spoonauer. Here’s an interesting excerpt from his article:

The Bionic part in the name of Apple’s A11 Bionic chip isn’t just marketing speak. It’s the most powerful processor ever put in a mobile phone. We’ve put this chip to the test in both synthetic benchmarks and some real-world speed trials, and it obliterates every Android phone we tested.

To put the phone through its paces, they used the popular Geekbench benchmarking app and achieved scores we’ve seen before. The real story here is a huge jump in multi-core performance, unlike with prior Apple chips that excelled in single-core tests but were matched or beaten by flagship Android devices in multi-threaded performance.

On the multicore portion of the Geekbench test, the phone registered a score of 10,170, or 54 percent faster than the score from Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8, the fastest Android phone.

The Android competition wasn’t close. The Note 8 scored 6,564, and that’s with an impressive 6GB of RAM paired with Qualcomm’s fast Snapdragon 835 chip. How about the OnePlus 5 and its 8GB of RAM and Snapdragon 835? That handset got 6,542. With 4GB of RAM, the Galaxy S8 scored 6,295 with the same processor.

In the 3DMark graphics benchmark, Apple’s phone hit an off-the-charts score of 62,212 (iPhone 8 Plus: 64,412) versus Note 8’s 39,834 and OnePlus 5’s 39,576. iPhone 8 even beats the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a seventh-generation Intel Core i5 inside.

According to Geekbench founder John Poole, “the scores are comparable across platforms, so if an iPhone 8 scores higher than a Core i5 chip, then the phone is faster than the Core i5.”

However, synthetic benchmarks don’t really paint a fully realistic picture so Tom’s Guide put the same two-minute 4K drone on Apple’s device, Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S8 Plus and added the same transitions and effects before exporting and saving the video.

That’s some strenuous task and iPhone 8 finished it in 42 seconds. By comparison, Note 8 took more than three minutes and Galaxy S8 Plus took more than four minutes. In other words, iPhone 8 was more than four times as fast in this particular CPU-intensive task than Samsung’s phones and this tells you how fast the A11 Bionic is in real-life use.

One crucial piece of information was omitted: the app Tom’s Guide used to test 4K video exporting on both platforms. Having a video editing app highly optimized for a target mobile platform that uses the best available APIs and GPU-assisted video encoding can make a world of difference so bear that in mind.

At any rate, there’s no question that the amount of work Apple’s silicon team has been pouring into making their in-house designed chips stand above anything else available on the market is astounding, really, and they’ve really outdone themselves this time around.

Those kinds of numbers are simply unheard of in the mobile industry. Android vendors who use chips from Qualcomm will have some catching up to do to match the levels of single and multi-core performance of the A11 Bionic chip, and Apple is already working on its successor.

The A11 Bionic silicon has two high-performance cores while adding an additional two low-power cores versus the A10 Fusion hip for a total of six CPU cores that are independently addressable to achieve top performance during heavy-duty operations.

Apple claims the two performance cores achieve 25 percent faster performance over the A10 Fusion chip, with as much as a 70 percent speed boost for the low-power cores.

The chip also includes Apple’s first in-house deigned mobile GPU offering 30 percent faster graphics and provides a dedicated neural engine and other specialized sections to accelerate tasks like machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence and more.