I am personally stoked to see that my new phone will be 64-bit. That was the big one on my wish list. The moment I read it from the live blogs I literally shouted "fuckin' eh"!
I don't understand how people argue that 64-bit will is not monumental in its scope. Saying that it's just a little bump up and that it won't see any big developments compared to their 32-bit counterpart is completely short sighted. I ask you what differences did one see from the original 4-bit atari to the 8-bit nintendo to the 16-bit super nintendo to the 32-bit playstation to current gaming consoles? If anyone argues that the changes weren't staggering, then to the ignore list you go.
If the gaming arguenment still doesn't do it for you, then I direct your attention to word processing. Why is it that programs today are leaps and bounds better than years past? Is it more creative code writing that has made these significant improvements or is it that there are more possibilities to describe shadows, textures, fonts, graphics, links, etc only possible by 32-bit and even greater in 64-bit machines. I would agree that we have only started to see the benefits to 64-bit programming on the PC side of things. But what's been learned thus far is easily transferred to the mobile landscape.
Apple gets this, they've started to utilize that in their camera app. Yes some of the things seen can be done on a 32-bit processor but one can't argue the benefits to utilizing those benefits in 64-bit. Just imagine taking a picture in 16-bit. You get a whopping +65 000 colours. With 32-bit you get the full +16 million colors plus other bits to play with. (i.e. face recognition, geotagging, etc). If you try to do geo-tagging with a 16-bit camera you will inevitably lose some of the already few +65 000 colors. Bringing things into the 64-bit range will allow everything you can do with 32-bit and a whole lot more. One of the additions I already want apple to incorporate is the ability to voice tag photos. You've just taken some photos of a particular site where something funny happened, let's say your significant other just fell in the water. The (32-bit and 64-bit) camera has taken the date, time, place, and face of that particular photo. You then tag with your voice on your (64-bit) camera, "Sue completely bailed off of the dock, she looks hilarious. I don't know where we'll be able to dry off". Those tags can now be used for later. Flash forward 8 years, you're reminiscing about that vacation and you laugh at that memory. Instead of wasting time looking for the photo all you have to do is say, "Sue falling off the pier." and the memory (picture) is displayed.
64-bit is going to be awesome! 128-bit will be out of this world!!!!!
Where's your evidence neither Google or Microsoft are not working on 64-bit. Until a few days ago there was no evidence apple were working on it either.
Apple is secretive. Google and Microsoft are show-offs.
So, yes, both Google and Microsoft would have shown something like 64-bit OS, just to beat Apple to the punch. They didn't.
To be clear, the article seeks to mislead and bamboozle with jargon; Windows does not have a 'limited' 64-bit capability.
Very simply, Microsoft added a new integral datatype called longlong and made the long type, which is traditionally the 64-bit type, as 32-bits. They just added a datatype instead of break the existing one. That's all.
If you have a large amount of data to address, store or compute, then you use longlong. Arrays can be indexed using longlong and thus hold just as much data as any other 64-bit structure on any other system.
If you port an UNIX application to Windows, you just have to remember to use longlong, not long.
Thus Microsoft or Windows does not have a legacy 32-bit compromise.
I'm interested in reading a good honest article about 64-bit and what this means for Apple vs Windows vs Android, unfortunately this DED guy is really crazy and I can't trust a single word he says. Actually I just couldn't read more than a few paragraphs. He makes me sick.
There's a picture on the web of an Intel IDF banner with a icon saying "64-bit" next to a picture of the Green Android Robot. That's probably what you were looking for.
Looking at it will probably make you feel less sick.
Apple is secretive. <span style="font-size:16px;line-height:1.4em;">Google and Microsoft are show-offs.</span>
<span style="font-size:16px;line-height:1.4em;">So, yes, both Google and Microsoft </span> <span style="line-height:1.4em;">would have shown something like 64-bit OS, just to beat Apple to the punch. They didn't.</span>
OK, enlighten me as to what is going to be in Android 5.0 then?
AllThingsD: “Because Apple makes the development environment and has updated those tools for 64-bit architectures, a developer only really needs to recompile their application to make it 64-bit compatible — assuming they haven’t done anything non-standard with their code,” said Howe. “This will not be true with Android, by the way. The Android Java app and native app environment will need support from Oracle, who owns the Java environment, as well as 64-bit support from the Android kernel. Android has a lot more moving pieces to coordinate, and will take longer to go to 64-bit.”
He did say that the only way at the time to create 3rd party apps was to write web apps.
He also said that they would like to offer a native SDK, when they can figure out how to do it right
The key issue is the timing. SJ announced in June 2007 that the iPhone would run 3rd party web apps in safari. He introduced the original iPhone to the world primarily as a fixed function device, namely, "an iPod, a phone, an internet communications device". Apple started talking about a third party SDK in October 2007, and rolled it out in 2008 with iOS 2.0, together with an infrastructure for running third party apps securely. No one questions that iOS has since become much more of a platform for full-blooded third-party applications. My original claim was made with respect to the original iOS.
Thanks for an excellent article. I for one can't wait to see the back of Android, and lately there are so many new job opening for Android developer. Despite the fact that I don't know anyone doing pay-for-app making any money from that pit (advert app is a different story) I guess it's some people can't held on to their nerve, and keep hearing scrum bags chanting Apple is doom all day long. Well, if you tell a lie repeatedly, at some point might make someone believe it's true.
Anyway, Apple just lift the curtain of a new era (again for the n times) it will be very interesting to see what happen in the next 2-3 years. I don't think Android is going to survive that long. Smaller player, such as Ubuntu might be able to fill in that gap rather quickly. Most of the people who buy Android purely because it's cheap, it has internet and a camera. They don't really care all that much. So there is no different to them be it an Android or anything else.
BTW, I think Apple insider should start a new section on tracking those anal-ylist performance. This might be quite a good money spinner in the long run
I have no idea what these babys cost, but assuming that its in excess of $100.00, it makes little sense to put $100+ chip in a $200.00 phone! Which make up the majority of android devices!
It's not magic, data can be processed faster. Instead of 32-bits per cycle the CPU processes 64-bits. Is it a huge increase in speed, no it's not. I think when Intel Macs went from 32-bit to 64-bit, the OS saw an overall increase of 10-15%.
A 64-bit CPU can process twice as many bits as a 32-bit CPU. Addressing is NOT what determines the "bitness" of a CPU, it's how many bits of data it can process per cycle. This also has a side effect of making the CPU more efficient, requiring less power.
The ARMv8 ISA only uses a 48-bit addressing space (256TB), but it is in fact a 64-bit processor.
Yes, "a 64-bit CPU can process twice many bits as a 32-bit CPU", but only if you give it twice as many bits to process. If your program is CPU-bound and handles a lot of 64 bit integers, such as if you are using the GMP bignum library, it will benefit directly from being able to fit 64 bit integers into a single register. Otherwise, the 64 bit registers alone will contribute little to no improvement in performance.
Quote:
It's too bad EVERYONE just focuses on the "64-bit" part of the A7 when there's so much more to it that can and will increase the speed of apps optimized for it.
AllThingsD: “Because Apple makes the development environment and has updated those tools for 64-bit architectures, a developer only really needs to recompile their application to make it 64-bit compatible — assuming they haven’t done anything non-standard with their code,” said Howe. “This will not be true with Android, by the way. The Android Java app and native app environment will need support from Oracle, who owns the Java environment, as well as 64-bit support from the Android kernel. Android has a lot more moving pieces to coordinate, and will take longer to go to 64-bit.”
I won't pretend to be a tech genius. I have no idea how exactly 64-bit will benefit IOS. What I do believe, however, is that Apple no doubt has big plans for this.
Apple has traditionally been very conservative with specs. They are not going to spend so much resources moving their OS over to 64-bit purely for marketing reasons if it did not fit in their long-term roadmap.
Well consider that:
- Chrome, Firefox, Opera and MSIE on Windows are only distributed as "32-bit" because they erroneously assume that nobody uses more than 4 tabs. (64-bit versions of firefox nightly let you open hundreds of tabs, why you need that many, who knows.)
- Adobe didn't make their CS suite completely 64-bit until CC in 2013 (and even then I'm not sure all the applications are 64bit as I refuse to rent software.) The first and only application to go 64-bit was Photoshop, in CS4.
The only OS's where you can get a "pure" 64-bit experience are OS X, and FreeBSD, since the former comes with a 64-bit browser, and the latter will let you compile one (because you can't assume it's safe to run 32bit software.) Linux is a bit of a hit and miss, on Gentoo where you can compile everything, you can make sure everything is 64-bit, but on most binary-distributed (RPM/DEB) you can't even guarantee any binary distribution will run.
Developers consistently make mistakes under assumptions that they can fix it later, when that has never EVER been the case. Windows 64-bit state is a good example, if I check the process list, everything running except notepad and the OS itself, is 32bit. Even the browser. When you run MSIE on Windows 7, it loads a 64-bit parent process, but all the tabs are 32-bit.
Now on OSX... Just about everything in the OS is 64-bit. (The current iPhone simulator, for iOS6 is not) however
- Safari is 64bit
- Chrome is 32bit
- Firefox is 64bit
- Opera is 32bit
So on OS X, your best options are to use Safari or Firefox. Where as on Windows, there are no (non-beta quality) 64-bit browsers.
So what does this mean for 64-bit? Application developers are hesitant to switch to 64-bit development out of inertia and assumptions that the 32-bit mode will continue to exist in future versions of the operating systems. Given there's no reason to remove 32-bit mode (much like x86 chips can still run 16-bit 8088/8086/80286 software if you can find it) but future versions of the operating systems may remove 32-bit support (Windows removed 16-bit support in all 64-bit versions of Windows)
It's much like the existing problem of most applications, still assume there is only one CPU and the CPU will continue to get faster, when the opposite is true. The performance differential between the slowest CPU Apple puts in a non-iOS product and the fastest is (Passmark 1515(baseline Macmini/macbook Air) vs 2,068 (i7-3770)) is 27%, Yet the slowest part here is the same performance as the high-end 8-core FX part from AMD. If you use geekbench (which takes into account all the cores) The first-generation Macbook Air is roughly the same performance as the current generation iPad (both being dual-core parts.)
So 64-bit doesn't automatically make something faster, but aspects of the 64-bit software do. To put more than 4GB of ram in a device requires 64bit address pointers, in turn requiring 64-bit instruction sets. The less mode-switching that goes on, the faster the device remains, which I'm pretty certain is one of the reasons why Apple may turn off "32-bit" mode in a future OS release of OS X or iOS. There is precedent for this (Removing Rosetta and Removing Mac OS Classic support.)
- Chrome, Firefox, Opera and MSIE on Windows are only distributed as "32-bit" because they erroneously assume that nobody uses more than 4 tabs.
Not quite. Chrome and IE assume that nobody uses more than 4gb per tab; each Chrome and IE tab runs in its own process. On the other hand, Firefox hasn't adopted the per-tab process model yet, so moving to a 64 bit build is a more pressing concern for that browser.
The only OS's where you can get a "pure" 64-bit experience are OS X, and FreeBSD, since the former comes with a 64-bit browser, and the latter will let you compile one (because you can't assume it's safe to run 32bit software.) Linux is a bit of a hit and miss, on Gentoo where you can compile everything, you can make sure everything is 64-bit, but on most binary-distributed (RPM/DEB) you can't even guarantee any binary distribution will run.
Most mainstream linux distributions release both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The amd64 releases all track 64-bit software repositories by default, and most don't even have 32 bit libraries unless you go out of your way to install a third-party 32-bit application. Chrome has 64-bit builds for Linux. Do people actually still use gentoo these days?
I agree the AppleTV is a platform that can use more power… but… an ARM iOS laptop… no Intel (and that $100+ tax on their chipset), and no Samsung. Sell it with either Mac OSX or iOS on it.
...and everything Surface wanted to be but couldn't (you want desktop or mobile OS… Or even dual boot/emulation… yeah, we got it.)
Comments
ROFL
Where's your evidence neither Google or Microsoft are not working on 64-bit. Until a few days ago there was no evidence apple were working on it either.
Apple is secretive. Google and Microsoft are show-offs.
So, yes, both Google and Microsoft would have shown something like 64-bit OS, just to beat Apple to the punch. They didn't.
Very simply, Microsoft added a new integral datatype called longlong and made the long type, which is traditionally the 64-bit type, as 32-bits. They just added a datatype instead of break the existing one. That's all.
If you have a large amount of data to address, store or compute, then you use longlong. Arrays can be indexed using longlong and thus hold just as much data as any other 64-bit structure on any other system.
If you port an UNIX application to Windows, you just have to remember to use longlong, not long.
Thus Microsoft or Windows does not have a legacy 32-bit compromise.
There's a picture on the web of an Intel IDF banner with a icon saying "64-bit" next to a picture of the Green Android Robot. That's probably what you were looking for.
Looking at it will probably make you feel less sick.
OK, enlighten me as to what is going to be in Android 5.0 then?
[URL]http://allthingsd.com/20130913/apples-iphone-5s-the-a7-chip-and-that-64-bit-question/[/URL]
I was hoping to read Mdriftmeyer's take on this. He is always very insightful.
That's not completely true.
He did say that the only way at the time to create 3rd party apps was to write web apps.
He also said that they would like to offer a native SDK, when they can figure out how to do it right
The key issue is the timing. SJ announced in June 2007 that the iPhone would run 3rd party web apps in safari. He introduced the original iPhone to the world primarily as a fixed function device, namely, "an iPod, a phone, an internet communications device". Apple started talking about a third party SDK in October 2007, and rolled it out in 2008 with iOS 2.0, together with an infrastructure for running third party apps securely. No one questions that iOS has since become much more of a platform for full-blooded third-party applications. My original claim was made with respect to the original iOS.
re-posted below.
Much appreciated, Sir.
ROFL
Please correct my thinking. I'm open to other points of view.
Anyway, Apple just lift the curtain of a new era (again for the n times) it will be very interesting to see what happen in the next 2-3 years. I don't think Android is going to survive that long. Smaller player, such as Ubuntu might be able to fill in that gap rather quickly. Most of the people who buy Android purely because it's cheap, it has internet and a camera. They don't really care all that much. So there is no different to them be it an Android or anything else.
BTW, I think Apple insider should start a new section on tracking those anal-ylist performance. This might be quite a good money spinner in the long run
I have no idea what these babys cost, but assuming that its in excess of $100.00, it makes little sense to put $100+ chip in a $200.00 phone! Which make up the majority of android devices!
It's not magic, data can be processed faster. Instead of 32-bits per cycle the CPU processes 64-bits. Is it a huge increase in speed, no it's not. I think when Intel Macs went from 32-bit to 64-bit, the OS saw an overall increase of 10-15%.
A 64-bit CPU can process twice as many bits as a 32-bit CPU. Addressing is NOT what determines the "bitness" of a CPU, it's how many bits of data it can process per cycle. This also has a side effect of making the CPU more efficient, requiring less power.
Yes, "a 64-bit CPU can process twice many bits as a 32-bit CPU", but only if you give it twice as many bits to process. If your program is CPU-bound and handles a lot of 64 bit integers, such as if you are using the GMP bignum library, it will benefit directly from being able to fit 64 bit integers into a single register. Otherwise, the 64 bit registers alone will contribute little to no improvement in performance.
This is very true.
I'm glad that we have DUD telling us how it is and not those other experts.
Hasn't he finished his term papers yet?
Howe is talking through his a$$ on this one.
Well consider that:
- Chrome, Firefox, Opera and MSIE on Windows are only distributed as "32-bit" because they erroneously assume that nobody uses more than 4 tabs. (64-bit versions of firefox nightly let you open hundreds of tabs, why you need that many, who knows.)
- Adobe didn't make their CS suite completely 64-bit until CC in 2013 (and even then I'm not sure all the applications are 64bit as I refuse to rent software.) The first and only application to go 64-bit was Photoshop, in CS4.
The only OS's where you can get a "pure" 64-bit experience are OS X, and FreeBSD, since the former comes with a 64-bit browser, and the latter will let you compile one (because you can't assume it's safe to run 32bit software.) Linux is a bit of a hit and miss, on Gentoo where you can compile everything, you can make sure everything is 64-bit, but on most binary-distributed (RPM/DEB) you can't even guarantee any binary distribution will run.
Developers consistently make mistakes under assumptions that they can fix it later, when that has never EVER been the case. Windows 64-bit state is a good example, if I check the process list, everything running except notepad and the OS itself, is 32bit. Even the browser. When you run MSIE on Windows 7, it loads a 64-bit parent process, but all the tabs are 32-bit.
Now on OSX... Just about everything in the OS is 64-bit. (The current iPhone simulator, for iOS6 is not) however
- Safari is 64bit
- Chrome is 32bit
- Firefox is 64bit
- Opera is 32bit
So on OS X, your best options are to use Safari or Firefox. Where as on Windows, there are no (non-beta quality) 64-bit browsers.
So what does this mean for 64-bit? Application developers are hesitant to switch to 64-bit development out of inertia and assumptions that the 32-bit mode will continue to exist in future versions of the operating systems. Given there's no reason to remove 32-bit mode (much like x86 chips can still run 16-bit 8088/8086/80286 software if you can find it) but future versions of the operating systems may remove 32-bit support (Windows removed 16-bit support in all 64-bit versions of Windows)
It's much like the existing problem of most applications, still assume there is only one CPU and the CPU will continue to get faster, when the opposite is true. The performance differential between the slowest CPU Apple puts in a non-iOS product and the fastest is (Passmark 1515(baseline Macmini/macbook Air) vs 2,068 (i7-3770)) is 27%, Yet the slowest part here is the same performance as the high-end 8-core FX part from AMD. If you use geekbench (which takes into account all the cores) The first-generation Macbook Air is roughly the same performance as the current generation iPad (both being dual-core parts.)
So 64-bit doesn't automatically make something faster, but aspects of the 64-bit software do. To put more than 4GB of ram in a device requires 64bit address pointers, in turn requiring 64-bit instruction sets. The less mode-switching that goes on, the faster the device remains, which I'm pretty certain is one of the reasons why Apple may turn off "32-bit" mode in a future OS release of OS X or iOS. There is precedent for this (Removing Rosetta and Removing Mac OS Classic support.)
Well consider that:
- Chrome, Firefox, Opera and MSIE on Windows are only distributed as "32-bit" because they erroneously assume that nobody uses more than 4 tabs.
Not quite. Chrome and IE assume that nobody uses more than 4gb per tab; each Chrome and IE tab runs in its own process. On the other hand, Firefox hasn't adopted the per-tab process model yet, so moving to a 64 bit build is a more pressing concern for that browser.
The only OS's where you can get a "pure" 64-bit experience are OS X, and FreeBSD, since the former comes with a 64-bit browser, and the latter will let you compile one (because you can't assume it's safe to run 32bit software.) Linux is a bit of a hit and miss, on Gentoo where you can compile everything, you can make sure everything is 64-bit, but on most binary-distributed (RPM/DEB) you can't even guarantee any binary distribution will run.
Most mainstream linux distributions release both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The amd64 releases all track 64-bit software repositories by default, and most don't even have 32 bit libraries unless you go out of your way to install a third-party 32-bit application. Chrome has 64-bit builds for Linux. Do people actually still use gentoo these days?
Think bigger. AppleTV.
Think bigger. PadBookAir (13" retina touchscreen, SSD, Thunderbolt, LTE, 'ac', iPad and integrated keyboard/trackpad, TouchID).