Performance was a key point in the Apple press event that unveiled the iPhone 5 last week, so we knew it was just a matter of time before someone benchmarked the new phone's actual performance.
Courtesy of Apple
Well, that didn't take long. Geekbench, a cross-platform benchmarking tool that we like to use here to measure Mac performance, was used to see how well the new iPhone 5 performs.
One of the services that Geekbench offers is its benchmark browser. Geekbench users can upload the results of their benchmark tests to Geekbench's web server, if they wish, and three individuals did exactly that this weekend.
Results for the iPhone 5 ranged from a high Geekbench score of 1645 to a low score of 979. We don't know the cause(s) of the difference between the high and low scores, but as someone who frequently uses Geekbench, I can tell you that the usual reason for large discrepancies is the processes that were already running on the device, or how memory was allocated before the benchmark was performed. My guess is the high score came from an iPhone 5 that had just been powered on, with few or no processes running.
As a comparison, the high Geekbench score for the iPhone 4S was 860, while the low benchmark was 455.
During its presentation, Apple said that the iPhone 5's new A6 processor is about twice as fast as the A5 processor in the iPhone 4S, and the benchmarks seem to bear this out.