According to new benchmarks from an iPhone SE review, this mobile phone outperforms all flagship Android phones in various CPU and GPU performance comparisons.
Due to its smaller screen that requires lower resolution compared to all other iPhone 11 flagships, the iPhone SE even outperforms them in GPU-intensive benchmarks.
iPhone SE beats Samsung S20 Ultra and Pixel 4 in performance
Powered by an A13 Bionic processor, the iPhone SE is a miniature machine. Despite a smaller size and lower price, it has the exact same processor as the iPhone 11, with the same clock speeds and number of cores.
According to an AnandTech Comment, the A13 Bionic SoC has the following specifications:
Thermaltake
- 2 × Lightning Performance @ 2.66GHz 8MB L2
- 4 × Thunder Efficiency @ 1.73GHz 4MB L2
The iPhone SE is also powered by an Apple GPU with 4 cores, however, the RAM used in the device is 3GB, which is 1GB less than the iPhone 11. iOS devices do not need 12GB of RAM to function well as Android flagships, so the iPhone SE has more than enough RAM to outperform Android offerings.
AnandTech put the phone to the test against other iPhone models and flagship smartphones from Samsung, Huawei, ASUS, Sony, LG, Google, and OnePlus. The iPhone SE ranked first in almost every benchmark compared to Android phones, even beating the iPhone 11 by one.
Early benchmarks measured Javascript performance, and the iPhone SE was just behind the iPhone 11 phones in Speedometer 2.0. However, it outperformed the iPhone 11 in JetStream 2. Compared to the next Android competitor in these benchmarks, the iPhone SE was twice as fast as the iPhone XNUMX. Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, which is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865.
In WebXPRT 3, which is another browser-based web performance benchmark, the iPhone SE outperformed the iPhone 11. This can be attributed to mobile phones having larger batteries that can help with power efficiency, compared to the SE's smallest battery.
At Basemark GPU 1.2, the Samsung S20 Galaxy Ultra, a $1,400 mobile phone, squared off with the iPhone SE on sustained performance, however, the latter handily outperformed it on top performance. In other GFXBench benchmarks, the iPhone SE was way ahead of Android's offerings, even beating the iPhone 11 in Vulkan/Metal off-screen numbers, in sustained performance. Check out the detailed GPU benchmarks here.
These benchmarks did not include numbers from Geekbench, which is often wrongly criticized for being favorable to iOS devices in terms of performance measurement. Of course, benchmarks only tell one side of the story.
However, this performance data shows that Android mobile phones are not the only thing their manufacturers believe, if a $400 phone can outperform their $1400 smartphone. If anything, this should compel customers to Android to request better performance on low to mid-range Android smartphones.