Apple's iPhone 6S Plus smashes its Android competition in AnTuTu's 2015 Top 10 chart

AnTuTu, the company behind the highly popular cross-platform mobile benchmark with the same name, has just announced which of the world's smartphones topped the performance charts in 2015. Although Apple's iPhone series doesn't come with octa-core processors, extreme core clock speeds, or whopping amounts of RAM, it turns out that the iPhone 6s Plus was by far the fastest smartphone of the previous year in terms of raw processing power.

AnTuTu has published a chart detailing the top 10 smartphones of the previous year in terms of average benchmark score. A quick glance at the chart reveals that the Apple iPhone 6s Plus distanced itself from the Android pack with an average score of 132,600 points. The second-placed handset, the Kirin 950-powered Huawei Mate 8, was only able to score 92,746 points on average. That's about 30% lower than the average AnTuTu score of an iPhone 6s Plus.

As many already know, the iPhone 6S Plus is powered by the Apple A9, a chipset that integrates a 1.84GHz dual-core Twister CPU and a PowerVR GT7600 GPU, paired with 2GB of RAM. On paper, the iPhone 6S Plus may not sound all that impressive compared to the Huawei Mate 8, a device which makes use of a 4GB of RAM and a Kirin 950 SoC with four Cortex A72 CPU cores clocked at 2.3GHz, four Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at 1.8GHz, and a Mali Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. It's also worth noting that both the Apple iPhone 6S Plus and the Huawei Mate 8 run a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, which should put the two devices on equal footing in terms of required resources.

In this context, it's kind of impressive that the iPhone 6S Plus was able to secure the first place in the AnTuTu benchmark chart for 2015 by a hefty margin.

The third, fourth, and fifth place in the AnTuTu chart are all occupied by smartphones that make use of the Samsung Exynos 7420 chipset. Interestingly, however, the Exynos 7420-powered smartphone that's not manufactured by Samsung, the Meizu Pro 5, was the fastest of the pack, although the score differences are negligible. The Meizu Pro 5 scored an average of 86,214 points in AnTuTu, followed by the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 with 83,364 points and the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+ with 82,087 points. At this point, it should be mentioned that Samsung's own phones run at a higher resolution compared to the Meizu Pro 5 (QHD vs FHD), which takes its toll on the overall performance during 3D tests.

Although its was actually launched in 2014, the Apple iPhone 6 Plus shows up on the sixth place with a score of 80,554 points. That's more than what Snapdragon 810-powered smartphones such as the Huawei Nexus 6P or the Xiaomi Note Pro were able to achieve.

Looking forward, it remains to be seen if the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and the Samsung Exynos 8890, the star chips of 2016 in the Android camp, will be able to dethrone the iPhone 6S Plus in the AnTuTu benchmark charts. Early signs hint that the new chips will be significantly faster compared to their predecessors, but we won't know by how much until the two new SoCs get implemented in commerciallly-available smartphones.

What do you guys think of AnTuTu's 2015 performance chart? Surprised to see that the iPhone 6S Plus is the fastest smartphone as per AnTuTu?