The iPhone 8 Plus took me quite by surprise when it came to the performance of the underlying A11 Bionic processor. Apple had hyped it heavily at its launch, but then it's unlikely you'd ever see an Apple event where Tim Cook got up on stage and mumbled something about new processors being merely OK.
However, while Apple has nicely kept pace with the mobile market in recent years, the A11 Bionic's performance in the iPhone 8 Plus was exceptional. It is well ahead of anything being done by contemporary Android devices. Or in other words, the gauntlet has well and truly been thrown down, and it has dented more than a few phone screens on the way.
However, the iPhone 8 is the lesser member of the family, and it's the sole entrant at this stage with only 2GB of RAM on board. The flip side there is that with a smaller, lower resolution screen, there's less of a performance impact shoving pixels around, so I was very curious to see how the iPhone 8 compared not only against other premium handsets, but also against the performance I'd seen out of the iPhone 8 Plus itself.
Here's how the iPhone 8 compared using the Geekbench 4 CPU test against premium 2017 smartphones in that particular benchmark:
Handset | Geekbench 4 CPU Single Core (higher is better) | Geekbench 4 CPU Multi Core (higher is better) |
---|
Apple iPhone 8 | 4270 | 10272 |
Apple iPhone 8 Plus | 4113 | 10221 |
Samsung Galaxy S8+ | 2020 | 6690 |
Samsung Galaxy S8 | 1989 | 6628 |
Huawei P10 Plus | 1863 | 6544 |
Nokia 8 | 1932 | 6529 |
OnePlus 5 | 1976 | 6506 |
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 | 2024 | 6490 |
HTC U11 | 1919 | 6362 |
And here's its comparative performance using 3DMark's Ice Storm Unlimited test:
Handset | 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited Result |
---|
Apple iPhone 8 | 64461 |
Apple iPhone 8 Plus | 59205 |
HTC U11 | 40239 |
Sony Xperia XZ Premium | 40086 |
OnePlus 5 | 39497 |
Apple iPhone 7 Plus | 37956 |
Apple iPhone 7 | 37717 |
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 | 32277 |
HTC U Ultra | 29968 |
These results (along with my own less formal testing of app performance on the iPhone 8) need some context.
Just as there is with the large number of Snapdragon 835-based Android handsets, the differences between the scores of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus aren't that significant in themselves because most benchmarks will return slightly different scores each time you run them.
However, they're still both obviously pushing state of the art in mobile CPUs and the iPhone 8 is clearly benefiting from that smaller screen, given it has overcome its RAM disparity along the way. It's also another challenge posed against the value proposition of the iPhone X because this is very good performance at nearly half the iPhone X's top asking price.
Against other premium Android handsets of its age, the iPhone 8 is genuinely impressive, especially if you've been a phone user who doesn't like larger phone displays because your choices here are relatively limited.
That does have to be put into the context of the display on the iPhone 8, which at 4.7 inches and 1134x750 pixels, is still quite small by modern standards.
Apple has integrated its automatic white balancing "true tone" technology, first seen on the iPad Pro, into the iPhone 8, and that does make for a pleasant viewing experience for such a relatively low-resolution screen. Still, there's no getting around the fact that this is a small display and small phone. If you've grown used to larger devices, switching down to a smaller phone can be quite a shock.