3 ms·

The article fails to mention that there are at least two contributing factors in the technology stack, raw CPU speed and efficiency of the JS engine.

• ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  It baffles me that AnandTech, which is so good on so many of these tech topics commits the double flaw of a) using the sunspider benchmark at all (as it's the least meaningful of the various Javascript benchmarks) and b) continually using it to compare devices running different javascript engines (or different versions of the same engine over time) and implying it measures hardware differences.
  • pervycreeper 14y ago
    For your second point, the same benchmark on a 4s with ios6 would serve as a control for hardware. Also, considering smartphones are used for web browsing, javascript performance is a valid thing to measure.
    • masklinn 14y ago
      According to Weiran, iOS6 on a 4S gets about 2000ms (applying a ~10% improvement to the chart's 2200ms 4S score): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4543358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4543358
  • czr80 14y ago
    Did you read the article? They were perfectly upfront about the limitations of sunspider and only drew the cautious conclusion that the A6 likely has a better cache/memory interface compared to Cortex A9. I think they're just excited to have a new, unknown chip to try to figure out so any bit on information is worth chewing over.
  • masklinn 14y ago
    If you read the original anandtech article (or even just the linked appleinsider repost, which keeps these parts mostly intact), Anand clearly notes that Sunspider is not a very good benchmark these days: > SunSpider is quickly outlasting its welcome as a smartphone benchmark but that it keeps significant value in its stressing of the memory interface: > it does do a great job of highlighting issues with the Cortex A9's memory interface. Intel originally hinted at issues in the A9's memory interface as being why Atom was able to so easily outperform other ARM based SoCs in SunSpider. He also ends the 3-paragraph note by stating that SPECint would really need to be ported and run to have actionable numbers beyond mere hints. Your criticism is unwarranted and merely highlights that you haven't bothered reading either the original source or the secondary source linked here.
  • nerdtalker 14y ago
    What would you suggest as a better Javascript benchmark? V8? Octane?
  • Symmetry 14y ago
    The Anandtech article on Sunspider is mostly just a followup to their article on Geekbench. We'll see an in-depth article once they manage to actually get one of the new iPhones in their lab. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6298/analyzing-iphone5-geekbench-results http://www.anandtech.com/show/6298/analyzing-iphone5-geekben...
  • ZeroGravitas 14y ago
    Replying to various similar comments in one go: I have read the original AnandTech article, and read perhaps 40 or so very similar articles from them over the last year or so. At no point in that time was the benchmark valid for comparing hardware if you used the stock javascript engine, so it's long, long past "wearing out it's welcome" in that regard. Any benchmark is suspect, but running a javascript benchmark in order to measure hardware improvements is crazy, as the various javascript developers and phone manufacturers are in a mad scramble to improve on benchmarks and ship the latest code. The resulting graph is almost entirely worthless, you might as well sort them by time of release. It's only rubbing salt into the wound that they use Sunspider, which even as a javascript benchmark tells you basically nothing about relative javascript performance. Maybe it does tell you something about memory bandwidth but I can't really take AnandTech's word on that, since they've been using it for something else that it's totally unsuited to measure for so long that they've lost my faith on that topic.