How can the iPhone 7 beat the Galaxy S7 in benchmark tests, even having fewer cores and less RAM? | Quora

Do you honestly believe — that speed has anything to do with cores or RAM — in this place…

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How can the iPhone 7 beat the Galaxy S7 in benchmark tests, even having fewer cores and less RAM?

I have tested scores of devices hundreds of times using Geekbench:
Exspyguy’s Profile — Geekbench Browser (https://browser.geekbench.com/user/17469)

On-die instruction and data caches are a small factor:

Level 1, 2 and 3 Cache will run at the uProcessor core frequency

Performance delta in Memory

But the biggest discrepancy between an iOS device and an Android device is the real-world memory transfer performance and its theoretical bandwidth. You can think of this as a ratio of how fat the memory pipe is, and how many bits get latched per clock cycle (efficiency) and how many clock cycles are available in a given time span (speed) — in this case 1 second.

The theoretical memory bandwidth is the product of the clock frequency (speed) and the width of the address/data bus.

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The iPhone 7 has a theoretical memory bandwidth of ~13GB/second. And in this test the iPhone 7 takes advantage of almost 10GB per second at 9.58GB/second:

If you peruse through my benchmarks using the link above….you will find that this ratio is pretty tight on iOS because of software optimization for the hardware it is deployed on. While there are wait-states, the iPhone will utilize a higher percentage of its theoretical memory bandwidth than its competitors. In the context of memory performance, there are less empty clock cycles (clock cycles that don’t do anything) as a percentage of the available ticks that can latch a bit.

You can imagine this as an assembly line of holes (clock cycles) racing past a worker (memory controller) on an assembly line (theoretical memory bandwidth) who has the responsibility of placing a peg (one bit of data) in each hole (clock cycle).

While I don’t have an S7 bench let’s look at my LG xTab 8:

Here, the ratio is about 1:2 Android will move about half the data it has the capability to move in the context of memory bandwidth.

The iPhone ratio is 3:4. It can utilize about 75% of its total bandwidth.
You will find this pattern holds up well on Geekbench benchmarks.

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Originally published at imthemobile.guru.