Ever since the creation of phones, we seem to be fascinated with the idea of who has the faster phone and who has higher quality specifications. With these smartphones carrying high-end technologies, from big box companies looking to put better and more superior CPU’s and GPU’s inside of them, some of us start comparing specs against all previous smartphones that have been released and even start comparing against each other. While all this came about it got even easier to compare devices without having to lay them next to each other and test them manually. Certain programs and applications were born and can easily now detect one’s software and test physical hardware and software capabilities in all devices. Many of these programs like AnTuTu or Vellamo benchmarking can help us see how our phones test in the real world of applications during small to heavy use of our everyday activities. While it is said that AnTuTu is the number one app, it really does seem to show you quite a bit of your phone’s overall performance in real world scenarios.
AnTuTu, like many of the other benchmarking tests, is an Android application that includes memory performance, CPU integer performance, CPU floating point performance, 2D-3D graphics, SD card read-write speeds, and database IO performance testing. At the end of its testing, it provides you with an overall average score which then compares against other devices from different manufacturers. The higher the score the better. but do remember each testing platform is varied and some show different scores with lower and higher overall averages while testing multiple components in your device as well.
AnTuTu’s newest release – version 6.0, now features a cross-platform use on iOS and Android devices, something that was originally only for Android. What it has uncovered can be quite shocking considering that the top performing phone of 2015 is the iPhone 6S Plus. The iPhone 6S Plus only features a dual-core with only 2GB of RAM and outperforms, according to the graph, many of the higher-end flagship phones. While Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5 finished in fourth with a score just above its cousin the Galaxy S6 Edge Plus, the Nexus 6P comes in dead last. Following the listed iPhones, the Huawei Mate 8 came in the next highest benchmark which features a quad-core processor like most of the phones displayed. Each device in AnTuTu’s score is made up of 500 data samples and is also an average of each device model and chip model. Using the graph as a reference, we can see that there are some gaps between Android and iOS. As this only dictates performance it’s still not a huge deciding factor when buying the phone. Ultimately it comes down to preference. With companies such as Samsung already building better and faster processors like the new Exynos 8890 that is said to be in the Samsung Galaxy S7, we can surely see that having better and faster chips in our phones doesn’t necessarily make that device the fastest performing phone.