The new iPhone 6s may not be as fast as my MacBook Pro, but according to our benchmarks, it's one of the two fastest mobile phones available today.

We ran a range of benchmarks on our new 128GB iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. We started with the cross-platform Antutu and Geekbench benchmarks, then moved on to the GFXBench and 3DBench graphics benchmarks. Finally, we compared the 6 and 6s when it came to launching a game and exporting a movie.

The Antutu, Geekbench, and 3dMark results are just arbitrary, synthetic numbers; higher is better. The GFXBench results are in frames per second.

We found that on most of the tests, the new iPhones are about 60 percent faster than the iPhone 6. The jump between the 6 and 6s is dramatically greater than that between the 5s and 6.

Now, this won't play out in all circumstances, because iOS optimizes some actions. Launching the game Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit took 16 seconds on the iPhone 6 and 15 seconds on the 6s.

Digging more deeply, we find that the 6s's 1.8GHz A9 processor beats the 6's A8 most profoundly on floating-point operations, RAM access, and 3D graphics.

The graphics improvements are a big story here. In the GFXBench T-Rex test, the 6s finally hits the 60 frame-per-second refresh rate of the display, and exceeds it in the offscreen version of the test. The A9 even beats the Nvidia Shield Tablet, the previous mobile graphics leader.

Faster Than Samsung?
The A9 puts Qualcomm's current processor lineup to shame and sends Intel's Atom-based phones home in tears. The only thing we've tested that measures up is the 2.1GHz Exynos 7420 chip in the Samsung Galaxy Note 5. And here, we have a problem.

We can certainly say that the A9 has more graphics horsepower than the Exynos 7420. But when you talk about overall processor speed, you have to ask whether it's per-core or multi-core. Apple's individual cores are much faster than Samsung's, but the A9 has two rather than the four Samsung can turn on at once, so Samsung wins on multi-core measurements.

This ends up becoming a debate over whether apps and operating systems can properly take advantage of multiple cores. Apple partisans tend to say no. People who use Android, and especially Windows, tend to say yes. There's also a debate among chip makers over whether it's more power efficient to pump one really fast core, or to have a combination of different cores for different purposes. Our columnist Michael Miller has a rundown of the state of the mobile core market.

Two things are clear, though: all existing iPhone users will see a major speed bump from the new processor, and the new iPhone is one of the two fastest handhelds on the market today.