Smartphones and tablets have stopped changing all that much from year to year, which makes it easy to take for granted just how far they've come in such a relatively short time. One year of updates doesn't do much to impress anymore, but take three or four years of updates all at once and you'll have something to be impressed by.

Such is the case with the sixth-generation iPod Touch, which brings three years' and four generations' worth of processor improvements all at the same time. Jumping from an Apple A5 to an A8 results in an almost comically large performance improvement, though as we'll see, you're not quite getting iPhone 6 performance in an iPod-sized body.

The CPU

The iPod's A8 is running at around 1.1GHz, roughly 27 percent slower than the 1.4GHz A8 in the iPhone 6. When those phones were announced, Apple said the A8 was about 25 percent faster than the Apple A7 in the iPhone 5S—as you can probably guess, slowing the thing down by 300MHz makes it perform a whole lot like an A7.











Sometimes the higher-clocked 1.3GHz A7 beats the 1.1GHz A8; sometimes the newer architecture of the A8 trumps the older design of the A7. All of our standard benchmarks show that the two behave pretty much the same way in the majority of situations, though.

We've compared the new iPod to the old one, but there's really no comparison. Depending on the benchmark, the A8 is around five times as fast as the A5, and a look at Geekbench's micro-benchmarks can show even bigger improvements in some workloads.

The cryptographic benches are particularly surprising: the SHA1 test runs over ten times faster on the A8. The AES test runs about 53 times faster. Hardware AES and SHA acceleration are a couple of the features added in the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set—the move to 64-bit in mobile is about way more than the RAM limit.

The GPU

Here's where things get a little more interesting, both because the A8's GPU was a bigger improvement over the A7's and because the iPod has a smaller, lower-resolution screen than any of the iPhones.











The A8's GPU is around ten times as fast as the A5's, depending on what test you're looking at. Even more significant is the fact that the A5's GPU can't even run a lot of these tests, since it supports neither OpenGL ES 3.0 nor the Metal graphics API.

We fired up the Metal version of GFXBench to look at how the A8 stacked up to the A7 in the iPhone 5S and the A8 in the iPhone 6, and it looks like its speed hasn't been capped quite as aggressively as the CPU's. The Offscreen tests all render a 1080p image regardless of the screen's actual resolution—the iPod and the iPhone 6 turn in essentially identical scores for all tests. Most of the time, the A7 is around two-thirds the speed of both A8s.

The Onscreen tests render at the device's native resolution, taking screens into account. Here, the iPod can run the tougher Manhattan test around 33 percent faster than the iPhone. In tests that also tax the CPU (particularly the overall and physics scores for 3DMark) the slower CPU in the iPod still helps the iPhone pull ahead, but in pure graphics the two are on the same footing. If you don't need a cellular connection, this iPod is an ideal portable gaming device.

There's more to the new iPod than raw performance, but these numbers are probably the most interesting thing about it. We'll be publishing a full review next week that dives into the camera and the battery life, and we'll also take a look at the heat output of that powerful new processor.