Comparing A9 to x86
It isn't quite so easy to say "it compares to X" CPU since most benchmarks aren't all that good.
But assuming that's the case, that E6700 bought in 2006 would have vastly inferior graphics, and have a spinning hard drive instead of flash. I'd consider the SSD the biggest advance in computer performance in a generation. Any PC with a spinning hard drive - no matter what the CPU and GPU - is inferior to an iPhone 6S performance wise for real world use because of that. Yeah, your game on an 8 core extreme CPU with a $400 GPU that sounds like a jet engine may run at some incredible frame rate, but once you start doing something that has to hit the filesystem very much in a random fashion (like copying a big folder of small files) your performance will drop through the floor.
Not trying to toot Apple's horn here, the A9 is faster than the SoCs from Qualcomm and Samsung but not by a huge amount. This is more about how transistor performance has evolved over time to the point where a CPU consuming 2 watts can perform at an appreciable fraction of a CPU that consumes nearly 100 watts. That's pretty cool no matter what brand of phone it is found in!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
