The three main things I keep thinking about a 64bit iPhone are:
1) Unless you play games, you don't need this "power" at all.
therefore
2) It's main, and almost only real use will be in iPads
therefore
3) If the next iPads don't have an A7 in them, they kind of have a "negative" before they are even for sale.
Maybe that vague rumour about a second iPad mini update in mid 2014 is because the one they are going to sell next month is only 32 bit and will be obsolete after six months?
Think about using Airplay to view games being played on 64-bit A7 iPhones via Apple TV.
You might be right, but when nobody is left to copy, consumers will be left with a bunch of crappy products. I told everybody in my house they'd be disowned if ever a Samsung product makes it into my home.
Unfortunately Time Warner Cable cursed my household with the laggiest crappiest Samsung cable box you could imagine. Really, the lag in this thing is truly hard to believe.
Samsung just wants to claiming same hardware as apple, but this just is a random push for more poblisity if software want use it[quote name="hydr" url="/t/159498/not-to-be-outdone-by-apples-iphone-5s-samsung-pledges-64-bit-chips-in-next-galaxy-phones#post_2395408"]Samsung issues press release stating that the next Galaxy S5 will incorporate 64bit CPU, an improve camera and a fingerprint reader. And will come in a variety of colors. -Samsung out. [/quotit'd only forget a seperate motion proccesor running on dual core.
SamScream's copiers are hot and ready, as usual. It wasn't as if Apple designed and had its 64 chips ready to roar in a weekend but even with Apple's roadmap, the great copier will have its hands full in this little choir. I'm sure Apple's legal teem is up and ready to roar. This side show act will be hailed as progressive by the media. SamO'Sam, charge ahead.
So many posters here are just completely naive about how the design of hardware goes. If Samsung plans on including a 64-bit chip in it, they can't just start now and design the system. It takes YEARS to design a new processor. If Apple's releasing the A7 this year, they have probably already started designing the A10 that will come out 3 years from now. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. If samsung is capable of building a new chip from scratch in 6 months that has 64-bit capabilities, then they deserve to be the true rulers of the silicon world.
Anyhow, a 64-bit processor just isn't that big of a deal, especially in the mobile space. It's just now starting to make a difference on desktop processors, and mobile processors lag by at least 4-5 years. And all of the people who keep reciting that you need a 64-bit processor to handle more than 4GB of RAM are just idiots. Plenty of 32-bit processors were paired with more than 4GB of RAM. While an application's virtual address space is limited to 4GB, different applications can have different virtual address spaces. Internally, the hardware has a 32-bit bus for memory requests, but a separate bus for memory accesses. I can almost guarantee that apple's memory bus will not support 64-bit addresses... Quite simply, that's a waste of valuable wires that would be pushing 0's. I'm pretty sure even desktop CPUs /only/ have a 38-bit or so memory address (it's possible this has increased a little bit, but it's definitely far from 64-bits). This would limit the cpu's address space to 256GB, which is a fair tradeoff, as no single-chip systems will be able to support that much ram in the near future (and by the time they do they'll require new motherboards that won't support the old processors). By the same logic, old 32-bit CPUs often had a memory address bus that was greater than 32-bits allowing the cpu to address more memory.
First, Samsung is one of the mfg Apple uses for producing their proprietary ARM custom chip, beside Apple bought few years ago the R&D teams reponsible for Samsung ARM development, ever since Samsung are using generic and wildly available ARM + GPU design.
Second, there is a lot more to go with 64bit computing than merely addressing over 4GB of RAM, the terms itself meaning the length of the registers. Having registers twice as big and twice the numbers as the previous generation, the A7 is a desktop class beast for it's 1 watt power envelope. Going 64 bits was the best way to push further the ARM platform and eventually every device will be 64 bit. Apple does it right to be an early adopter.
Third, too bad Android only wins synthetic benchmark, this picture doesn't translate in real life application like browsing and games. This is were you realize that apps won't necessary benefit from adding more core to a CPU
Don't buy the hype.
Stretching architecture from 32 to 64 does not boos performance by default. Some tasks are positioned to take advantage of 64-bit registers - encryption comes to mind - but many are not.
In addition, there is additional complexity of emulation layer required to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit OS. This might introduce a small performance hit (compared to same software running on same hardware with 32-bit OS installed) as well as some compatibility issues.
This new Apple SoC is advertised to be up to 2x faster in CPU and GPU compared to iPhone 5 SoC. I'd be surprised to see it flat-rate 2x faster in everything... but even then, it is still far cry from modern desktop performance. Regardless of "desktop performance" marketing talk.
At this stage, 64-bit architecture is foundation for the future, but with not much short term advantage for iPhone 5s owners - if any. Pretty much every article I came across seems to agree with this.
Stretching architecture from 32 to 64 does not boos performance by default. Some tasks are positioned to take advantage of 64-bit registers - encryption comes to mind - but many are not.
In addition, there is additional complexity of emulation layer required to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit OS. This might introduce a small performance hit (compared to same software running on same hardware with 32-bit OS installed) as well as some compatibility issues.
This new Apple SoC is advertised to be up to 2x faster in CPU and GPU compared to iPhone 5 SoC. I'd be surprised to see it flat-rate 2x faster in everything... but even then, it is still far cry from modern desktop performance. Regardless of "desktop performance" marketing talk.
At this stage, 64-bit architecture is foundation for the future, but with not much short term advantage for iPhone 5s owners - if any. Pretty much every article I came across seems to agree with this.
Tell that to Seymour Cray, I agree going to 64 bit will no automatically double the performance of every task but many task can get benefit from it and since iOS got the richest sets of multimedia and signal processing oriented APIs, current apps will gain some benefit from the 64bit iOS 7 thru API call. Those are things Apple has done many times in his history; adding functionality and optimization thru API upgrades. Like the cut and paste feature in example, once they added functionality, it was available even in older apps pre-dating the features without any intervention of the apps developer. The CPU usage of iOS apps that use standard UI are mostly made of API calls, with Xcode you can actually create a full browser apps without a single line of code, only by linking UI elements directly to API call in the Interface Builder.
In addition, you are wrong. the ARM 64bit instructions set is an extension of the current 32 bit instructions, just like on x86 processors, your 64bit PC doesn't have to emulate 32 instructions for running 32 bit programs, it run it directly and use only 32 bits of the 64bit available register. But 64bit versions of Windoze does have to run his shit in a VM (SysWoW64), which isn't the case for OSX and iOS.
Regarding the performance boost, Apple is very secretive and gives very little technical detail but we know they double the number of register and double their size. I'm pretty sure other things like the RAM channels and I/O have been upgraded too. Its pretty conceivable to double the overall performance solely by doubling RAM channels and I/O bandwidth alone.
Apple has done bigger architecture switch in the past, if we took the PowerMac G5 for example, at time of launch every reviews praise how fast everything was on that new computer even if no apps was updated yet for the G5. Of course things could be different for the iPhone, but one thing for sure, 64bit is there to stay.
I'm kind of surprised by the number of people who are right next to a big reason for switching to 64-bit CPUs but haven't quite nailed it yet:
Encryption, as in AES and RSA. My bet is that this is going to be very important very soon as many websites and VPN providers significantly up their encryption levels in order to "NSA-proof" their services. 4096-bit RSA keys, anyone?
A 64-bit CPU (especially one with built-in AES encrypt/decrypt) will be able to handle these higher encryption levels all day long without breaking a sweat or killing its battery. You want to web surf nothing but heavily encrypted sites? No problem!
Apple could have very well decided to switch to ARMv8 due to their unpleasant behind-the-scenes experiences with the NSA over the last several years, and their desire to provide their customers (and themselves) with an "NSA-proof-ready" iPhone (and iPad, right?). It's not exactly something that Apple could easily market, but it might well be a feature that some of Apple's larger customers are already screaming for right now.
Also, 64-bit is pretty nice for speech recognition and synthesis. If Apple decides (or has already decided) to move some or all of Siri's processing from their servers to the mobile device, there you go.
And it lets the CPU speak straight 64-bit with the FPU and GPU. Save a few clock cycles right there.
Tell that to Seymour Cray, I agree going to 64 bit will no automatically double the performance of every task but many task can get benefit from it and since iOS got the richest sets of multimedia oriented APIs, current apps will gain some benefit from the 64bit iOS 7 thru API call. Those are things Apple has done many times in his history; adding functionality and optimization thru API upgrades. Like the cut and paste feature in example, once they added functionality, it was available even in older apps pre-dating the features without any intervention of the apps developer. The CPU usage of iOS apps that use standard UI are mostly made of API calls, with Xcode you can actually create a full browser apps without a single line of code, only by linking UI elements directly to API call in the Interface Builder.
In addition, you are wrong. the ARM 64bit instructions set is an extension of the current 32 bit instructions, just like on x86 processors, your 64bit PC doesn't have to emulate 32 instructions for running 32 bit programs, it run it directly and use only 32 bits of the 64bit available register. But 64bit versions of Windoze does have to run his shit in a VM (SysWoW64), which isn't the case for OSX and iOS.
Regarding the performance boost, Apple is very secretive and gives very little technical detail. But I'm pretty sure other things like the RAM channels and I/O have been upgraded too. Its pretty conceivable to double the overall performance solely by doubling RAM channels and I/O bandwidth alone.
Apple has done bigger architecture switch in the past, if we took the PowerMac G5 for example, at time of launch every reviews praise how fast everything was on that new computer even if no apps was updated yet for the G5. Of course things could be different for the iPhone, but one thing for sure, 64bit is there to stay.
What did the guys that wrote Infinity Blade say? They took a real power hungry app and converted it. Wouldn't other games and other apps see similar improvements?
The bottom line is they have to do the conversion and the sooner they do this, the sooner EVERYONE will have 64 bit apps. I think the hardware conversion will take 3 years and then another 2 years to get 90+% of the install base of iOS devices converted. It WILL take longer to get the Android crowd at the same level of conversion, especially with their piss poor execution of updating OSs on existing hardware.
I'm kind of surprised by the number of people who are right next to a big reason for switching to 64-bit CPUs but haven't quite nailed it yet:
Encryption, as in AES and RSA. My bet is that this is going to be very important very soon as many websites and VPN providers significantly up their encryption levels in order to "NSA-proof" their services. 4096-bit RSA keys, anyone?
A 64-bit CPU (especially one with built-in AES encrypt/decrypt) will be able to handle these higher encryption levels all day long without breaking a sweat or killing its battery. You want to web surf nothing but heavily encrypted sites? No problem!
Apple could have very well decided to switch to ARMv8 due to their unpleasant behind-the-scenes experiences with the NSA over the last several years, and their desire to provide their customers (and themselves) with an "NSA-proof-ready" iPhone (and iPad, right?). It's not exactly something that Apple could easily market, but it might well be a feature that some of Apple's larger customers are already screaming for right now.
Also, 64-bit is pretty nice for speech recognition and synthesis. If Apple decides (or has already decided) to move some or all of Siri's processing from their servers to the mobile device, there you go.
And it lets the CPU speak straight 64-bit with the FPU and GPU. Save a few clock cycles right there.
Thats a nice thought, while I agree encryption is an important aspect for high-end processing, I am not sure Apple's thinking behind rushing 64bit mobiles to market as being affected by this since nearly all mobile SoC got 128bit SIMDs more fits for encrypting-decrypting data streams than using the CPU ALU.
Just like the Athlon64, G5 or Core2Duo, even with unoptimized softwares for 64 bit platform, upgrading to 64bit hardware gives an overall oomph and somewhat a maturity over previous generations.
There is not a lots of way for boosting CPU performance, I counts 3: raise frequency, adding core, adding logics. We all know raising frequency got its limits, I thinks Apple chooses the sane way by going 64 bit before multiplicating cores too much.
Encryption, as in AES and RSA. My bet is that this is going to be very important very soon as many websites and VPN providers significantly up their encryption levels in order to "NSA-proof" their services. 4096-bit RSA keys, anyone?
A 64-bit CPU (especially one with built-in AES encrypt/decrypt) will be able to handle these higher encryption levels all day long without breaking a sweat or killing its battery. You want to web surf nothing but heavily encrypted sites? No problem!
Apple could have very well decided to switch to ARMv8 due to their unpleasant behind-the-scenes experiences with the NSA over the last several years, and their desire to provide their customers (and themselves) with an "NSA-proof-ready" iPhone (and iPad, right?). It's not exactly something that Apple could easily market, but it might well be a feature that some of Apple's larger customers are already screaming for right now.
Also, 64-bit is pretty nice for speech recognition and synthesis. If Apple decides (or has already decided) to move some or all of Siri's processing from their servers to the mobile device, there you go.
And it lets the CPU speak straight 64-bit with the FPU and GPU. Save a few clock cycles right there.
First, when it comes to encryption, the boost from 64bit is somewhat significant, but if you want to accelerate aes you add new instructions (like intel has with their cpus), or add a coprocessor onto the SoC. the performance will blow away what the CPU can do, and more importantly, it will burn far less power.
As for the NSA, apple is in bed with them already, and that isnt likely to change. Honestly, i think apple would be more likely to add backdoors in ios than the odds of the same happening to android. The advantage of open source is that the tinfoil hat people can, and will check out the code.
But 64bit versions of Windoze does have to run his shit in a VM (SysWoW64), which isn't the case for OSX and iOS.
From what I understand (well, after reading Wikipedia), SysWoW64 is not a VM. It's a set of compatibility libraries etc that makes running 32bit apps on 64bit os possible.
As you said, OS X and iOS do this by packing libraries for different archs into fat binaries. Windows (and Linux, and possibly Android as well) take different approach by providing them in separate files. Same idea, different approach.
Stretching architecture from 32 to 64 does not boos performance by default. Some tasks are positioned to take advantage of 64-bit registers - encryption comes to mind - but many are not.
In addition, there is additional complexity of emulation layer required to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit OS. This might introduce a small performance hit (compared to same software running on same hardware with 32-bit OS installed) as well as some compatibility issues.
This new Apple SoC is advertised to be up to 2x faster in CPU and GPU compared to iPhone 5 SoC. I'd be surprised to see it flat-rate 2x faster in everything... but even then, it is still far cry from modern desktop performance. Regardless of "desktop performance" marketing talk.
At this stage, 64-bit architecture is foundation for the future, but with not much short term advantage for iPhone 5s owners - if any. Pretty much every article I came across seems to agree with this.
I have to chuckle. I read the exact same thing said when 16 bit desktop OSs came out.
Second, 64 bit is part of a roadmap for the future, with almost no benefit today. This is true for both Samsung and Apple, but Samsung has reached the critical limit before Apple. That's because their current phones ship with 3GB RAM, almost the 4GB limit. iPhone 5s ships with only 2GB RAM (iPhone 5 has 1GB). Read this: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57602372-94/the-real-reasons-apples-64-bit-a7-chip-makes-sense/
Classic troll activity - Samsung makes the A7 but it is designed by Apple.
The chip IS significant - especially looking at the fingerprint reader and the new phone capabilities - 64 bit makes these excellent upgrades possible. Further, we need to wait and see what else is going to be available that will capitalize on all the functionality and benefits of it.
Hello, Samsung cheated with the S4 on its benchmark tests! Try to keep up, or quit doing the evil work of a troll!
Is it possible that, while manufacturing and testing the A7, Sammy didn't know it was 64-bit?
Without having any knowledge on this subject, the manufacturing process and all unknowns to me, this seems unlikely. Even though it also does 32 bit as well, there's no way to test a chip without testing all its capabilities, I'd say. But could be wrong.
What I want to know is why that stupid journalist from that Korean newspaper didn't ask them when they decided on making a 64 bit smartphone.
Is it possible that, while manufacturing and testing the A7, Sammy didn't know it was 64-bit?
I highly doubt it. A 32 bit processor has 8 lines of connections on each side and since a processor is square that makes it 8x4=32 whereas a 64 bit processor has 16 lines on each side, 16x4=64. Obviously there's more to than just that but Samsung absolutely knew what they were manufacturing for Apple.
I taped 2 samsung phones together and have 64 bit processing. Thanks samsung. I want to be in the commercial next.
Not only that you doubled the RAM and SSD -- and you can access both over the super-fast S-Beam (NFC - WiFi Direct) connect with a 6-10 access time and Hi-Speed battery drain.
Comments
The three main things I keep thinking about a 64bit iPhone are:
1) Unless you play games, you don't need this "power" at all.
therefore
2) It's main, and almost only real use will be in iPads
therefore
3) If the next iPads don't have an A7 in them, they kind of have a "negative" before they are even for sale.
Maybe that vague rumour about a second iPad mini update in mid 2014 is because the one they are going to sell next month is only 32 bit and will be obsolete after six months?
Think about using Airplay to view games being played on 64-bit A7 iPhones via Apple TV.
You might be right, but when nobody is left to copy, consumers will be left with a bunch of crappy products. I told everybody in my house they'd be disowned if ever a Samsung product makes it into my home.
Unfortunately Time Warner Cable cursed my household with the laggiest crappiest Samsung cable box you could imagine. Really, the lag in this thing is truly hard to believe.
[/quotit'd only forget a seperate motion proccesor running on dual core.
SamScream's copiers are hot and ready, as usual. It wasn't as if Apple designed and had its 64 chips ready to roar in a weekend but even with Apple's roadmap, the great copier will have its hands full in this little choir. I'm sure Apple's legal teem is up and ready to roar. This side show act will be hailed as progressive by the media. SamO'Sam, charge ahead.
So many posters here are just completely naive about how the design of hardware goes. If Samsung plans on including a 64-bit chip in it, they can't just start now and design the system. It takes YEARS to design a new processor. If Apple's releasing the A7 this year, they have probably already started designing the A10 that will come out 3 years from now. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. If samsung is capable of building a new chip from scratch in 6 months that has 64-bit capabilities, then they deserve to be the true rulers of the silicon world.
Anyhow, a 64-bit processor just isn't that big of a deal, especially in the mobile space. It's just now starting to make a difference on desktop processors, and mobile processors lag by at least 4-5 years. And all of the people who keep reciting that you need a 64-bit processor to handle more than 4GB of RAM are just idiots. Plenty of 32-bit processors were paired with more than 4GB of RAM. While an application's virtual address space is limited to 4GB, different applications can have different virtual address spaces. Internally, the hardware has a 32-bit bus for memory requests, but a separate bus for memory accesses. I can almost guarantee that apple's memory bus will not support 64-bit addresses... Quite simply, that's a waste of valuable wires that would be pushing 0's. I'm pretty sure even desktop CPUs /only/ have a 38-bit or so memory address (it's possible this has increased a little bit, but it's definitely far from 64-bits). This would limit the cpu's address space to 256GB, which is a fair tradeoff, as no single-chip systems will be able to support that much ram in the near future (and by the time they do they'll require new motherboards that won't support the old processors). By the same logic, old 32-bit CPUs often had a memory address bus that was greater than 32-bits allowing the cpu to address more memory.
Phil
Don't buy the hype.
Stretching architecture from 32 to 64 does not boos performance by default. Some tasks are positioned to take advantage of 64-bit registers - encryption comes to mind - but many are not.
In addition, there is additional complexity of emulation layer required to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit OS. This might introduce a small performance hit (compared to same software running on same hardware with 32-bit OS installed) as well as some compatibility issues.
This new Apple SoC is advertised to be up to 2x faster in CPU and GPU compared to iPhone 5 SoC. I'd be surprised to see it flat-rate 2x faster in everything... but even then, it is still far cry from modern desktop performance. Regardless of "desktop performance" marketing talk.
At this stage, 64-bit architecture is foundation for the future, but with not much short term advantage for iPhone 5s owners - if any. Pretty much every article I came across seems to agree with this.
Don't buy the hype.
Stretching architecture from 32 to 64 does not boos performance by default. Some tasks are positioned to take advantage of 64-bit registers - encryption comes to mind - but many are not.
In addition, there is additional complexity of emulation layer required to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit OS. This might introduce a small performance hit (compared to same software running on same hardware with 32-bit OS installed) as well as some compatibility issues.
This new Apple SoC is advertised to be up to 2x faster in CPU and GPU compared to iPhone 5 SoC. I'd be surprised to see it flat-rate 2x faster in everything... but even then, it is still far cry from modern desktop performance. Regardless of "desktop performance" marketing talk.
At this stage, 64-bit architecture is foundation for the future, but with not much short term advantage for iPhone 5s owners - if any. Pretty much every article I came across seems to agree with this.
Tell that to Seymour Cray, I agree going to 64 bit will no automatically double the performance of every task but many task can get benefit from it and since iOS got the richest sets of multimedia and signal processing oriented APIs, current apps will gain some benefit from the 64bit iOS 7 thru API call. Those are things Apple has done many times in his history; adding functionality and optimization thru API upgrades. Like the cut and paste feature in example, once they added functionality, it was available even in older apps pre-dating the features without any intervention of the apps developer. The CPU usage of iOS apps that use standard UI are mostly made of API calls, with Xcode you can actually create a full browser apps without a single line of code, only by linking UI elements directly to API call in the Interface Builder.
In addition, you are wrong. the ARM 64bit instructions set is an extension of the current 32 bit instructions, just like on x86 processors, your 64bit PC doesn't have to emulate 32 instructions for running 32 bit programs, it run it directly and use only 32 bits of the 64bit available register. But 64bit versions of Windoze does have to run his shit in a VM (SysWoW64), which isn't the case for OSX and iOS.
Regarding the performance boost, Apple is very secretive and gives very little technical detail but we know they double the number of register and double their size. I'm pretty sure other things like the RAM channels and I/O have been upgraded too. Its pretty conceivable to double the overall performance solely by doubling RAM channels and I/O bandwidth alone.
Apple has done bigger architecture switch in the past, if we took the PowerMac G5 for example, at time of launch every reviews praise how fast everything was on that new computer even if no apps was updated yet for the G5. Of course things could be different for the iPhone, but one thing for sure, 64bit is there to stay.
I'm kind of surprised by the number of people who are right next to a big reason for switching to 64-bit CPUs but haven't quite nailed it yet:
Encryption, as in AES and RSA. My bet is that this is going to be very important very soon as many websites and VPN providers significantly up their encryption levels in order to "NSA-proof" their services. 4096-bit RSA keys, anyone?
A 64-bit CPU (especially one with built-in AES encrypt/decrypt) will be able to handle these higher encryption levels all day long without breaking a sweat or killing its battery. You want to web surf nothing but heavily encrypted sites? No problem!
Apple could have very well decided to switch to ARMv8 due to their unpleasant behind-the-scenes experiences with the NSA over the last several years, and their desire to provide their customers (and themselves) with an "NSA-proof-ready" iPhone (and iPad, right?). It's not exactly something that Apple could easily market, but it might well be a feature that some of Apple's larger customers are already screaming for right now.
Also, 64-bit is pretty nice for speech recognition and synthesis. If Apple decides (or has already decided) to move some or all of Siri's processing from their servers to the mobile device, there you go.
And it lets the CPU speak straight 64-bit with the FPU and GPU. Save a few clock cycles right there.
Tell that to Seymour Cray, I agree going to 64 bit will no automatically double the performance of every task but many task can get benefit from it and since iOS got the richest sets of multimedia oriented APIs, current apps will gain some benefit from the 64bit iOS 7 thru API call. Those are things Apple has done many times in his history; adding functionality and optimization thru API upgrades. Like the cut and paste feature in example, once they added functionality, it was available even in older apps pre-dating the features without any intervention of the apps developer. The CPU usage of iOS apps that use standard UI are mostly made of API calls, with Xcode you can actually create a full browser apps without a single line of code, only by linking UI elements directly to API call in the Interface Builder.
In addition, you are wrong. the ARM 64bit instructions set is an extension of the current 32 bit instructions, just like on x86 processors, your 64bit PC doesn't have to emulate 32 instructions for running 32 bit programs, it run it directly and use only 32 bits of the 64bit available register. But 64bit versions of Windoze does have to run his shit in a VM (SysWoW64), which isn't the case for OSX and iOS.
Regarding the performance boost, Apple is very secretive and gives very little technical detail. But I'm pretty sure other things like the RAM channels and I/O have been upgraded too. Its pretty conceivable to double the overall performance solely by doubling RAM channels and I/O bandwidth alone.
Apple has done bigger architecture switch in the past, if we took the PowerMac G5 for example, at time of launch every reviews praise how fast everything was on that new computer even if no apps was updated yet for the G5. Of course things could be different for the iPhone, but one thing for sure, 64bit is there to stay.
What did the guys that wrote Infinity Blade say? They took a real power hungry app and converted it. Wouldn't other games and other apps see similar improvements?
The bottom line is they have to do the conversion and the sooner they do this, the sooner EVERYONE will have 64 bit apps. I think the hardware conversion will take 3 years and then another 2 years to get 90+% of the install base of iOS devices converted. It WILL take longer to get the Android crowd at the same level of conversion, especially with their piss poor execution of updating OSs on existing hardware.
I'm kind of surprised by the number of people who are right next to a big reason for switching to 64-bit CPUs but haven't quite nailed it yet:
Encryption, as in AES and RSA. My bet is that this is going to be very important very soon as many websites and VPN providers significantly up their encryption levels in order to "NSA-proof" their services. 4096-bit RSA keys, anyone?
A 64-bit CPU (especially one with built-in AES encrypt/decrypt) will be able to handle these higher encryption levels all day long without breaking a sweat or killing its battery. You want to web surf nothing but heavily encrypted sites? No problem!
Apple could have very well decided to switch to ARMv8 due to their unpleasant behind-the-scenes experiences with the NSA over the last several years, and their desire to provide their customers (and themselves) with an "NSA-proof-ready" iPhone (and iPad, right?). It's not exactly something that Apple could easily market, but it might well be a feature that some of Apple's larger customers are already screaming for right now.
Also, 64-bit is pretty nice for speech recognition and synthesis. If Apple decides (or has already decided) to move some or all of Siri's processing from their servers to the mobile device, there you go.
And it lets the CPU speak straight 64-bit with the FPU and GPU. Save a few clock cycles right there.
Thats a nice thought, while I agree encryption is an important aspect for high-end processing, I am not sure Apple's thinking behind rushing 64bit mobiles to market as being affected by this since nearly all mobile SoC got 128bit SIMDs more fits for encrypting-decrypting data streams than using the CPU ALU.
Just like the Athlon64, G5 or Core2Duo, even with unoptimized softwares for 64 bit platform, upgrading to 64bit hardware gives an overall oomph and somewhat a maturity over previous generations.
There is not a lots of way for boosting CPU performance, I counts 3: raise frequency, adding core, adding logics. We all know raising frequency got its limits, I thinks Apple chooses the sane way by going 64 bit before multiplicating cores too much.
First, when it comes to encryption, the boost from 64bit is somewhat significant, but if you want to accelerate aes you add new instructions (like intel has with their cpus), or add a coprocessor onto the SoC. the performance will blow away what the CPU can do, and more importantly, it will burn far less power.
As for the NSA, apple is in bed with them already, and that isnt likely to change. Honestly, i think apple would be more likely to add backdoors in ios than the odds of the same happening to android. The advantage of open source is that the tinfoil hat people can, and will check out the code.
Phil
From what I understand (well, after reading Wikipedia), SysWoW64 is not a VM. It's a set of compatibility libraries etc that makes running 32bit apps on 64bit os possible.
As you said, OS X and iOS do this by packing libraries for different archs into fat binaries. Windows (and Linux, and possibly Android as well) take different approach by providing them in separate files. Same idea, different approach.
I doubt they'd empty your bank account though.
I have to chuckle. I read the exact same thing said when 16 bit desktop OSs came out.
A couple of things...
First, don't bash Samsung for making junk. Why? The A7 is made by Samung, at least in part if not entirely: http://************/2013/07/31/apples-upcoming-a7-iphone-chip-will-have-samsung-components-code-inside-ios-7-reveals/
Second, 64 bit is part of a roadmap for the future, with almost no benefit today. This is true for both Samsung and Apple, but Samsung has reached the critical limit before Apple. That's because their current phones ship with 3GB RAM, almost the 4GB limit. iPhone 5s ships with only 2GB RAM (iPhone 5 has 1GB). Read this: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57602372-94/the-real-reasons-apples-64-bit-a7-chip-makes-sense/
Third, benchmarks show that A7 is twice as fast as A6, which puts it around the same performance as today's Galaxy S4: http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2013/03/samsung-galaxy-s-4-benchmarks/
Classic troll activity - Samsung makes the A7 but it is designed by Apple.
The chip IS significant - especially looking at the fingerprint reader and the new phone capabilities - 64 bit makes these excellent upgrades possible. Further, we need to wait and see what else is going to be available that will capitalize on all the functionality and benefits of it.
Hello, Samsung cheated with the S4 on its benchmark tests! Try to keep up, or quit doing the evil work of a troll!
Without having any knowledge on this subject, the manufacturing process and all unknowns to me, this seems unlikely. Even though it also does 32 bit as well, there's no way to test a chip without testing all its capabilities, I'd say. But could be wrong.
What I want to know is why that stupid journalist from that Korean newspaper didn't ask them when they decided on making a 64 bit smartphone.
I highly doubt it. A 32 bit processor has 8 lines of connections on each side and since a processor is square that makes it 8x4=32 whereas a 64 bit processor has 16 lines on each side, 16x4=64. Obviously there's more to than just that but Samsung absolutely knew what they were manufacturing for Apple.
Not only that you doubled the RAM and SSD -- and you can access both over the super-fast S-Beam (NFC - WiFi Direct) connect with a 6-10 access time and Hi-Speed battery drain.