Just how fast is the iPhone 8 Plus?
— 2 min read
I got my iPhone 8 Plus yesterday, and as any good techie, I wanted to see how much faster it was than my “old” iPhone 7 Plus. Apple advertised some significant improvements in their new A11 Bionic chip, so I had to see if they were right.
First, I ran 4 of the major browser benchmarks to see how much web performance should improve. The results are below:
Depending on the test we were basically in the 30-60% improvement range year-over-year. That’s quite impressive!
My next test was to see how each phone handled one of the hardest tasks I personally throw at my phone on a regular basis. I shoot a good number of my posed photographs with Adobe’s Lightroom app because it takes RAW images and lets me edit them to my heart’s content. Once I’ve made my edits, I export the photos to my camera roll, which is a very CPU-intensive process. Here’s a video of the 2 phones exporting the same 10 photos with exactly the same edits:
The iPhone 8 Plus finished the task in just over half the time, representing a 91% improvement in performance. This more dramatic increase is likely due to the iPhone 8’s ability to use all 6 CPU cores at once. I believe Lightroom utilizes as many cores as iOS can give it, but it’s hard to prove such things. But considering the jump in performance, that’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
As with all benchmarks, take these with a grain of salt. These are as scientific as possible, but they are in no way a complete look at the overall performance of the new iPhone. I’m sure other writers and YouTubers will fill this gap very soon!