Indian and Pakistani people (let's just call them brown or Desi), no matter where or what they have achieved in this world, will always have a stripe of jealousy down their backs. They can never allow anyone else a moment to shine without taking the an opportunity to swipe. It happens all the time between India and Pakistan, and you can clearly sense his jealousy in this statement.
Their inability to see past themselves is a trait shared by nearly 99.9% of Indian/Pakistani men. Idiots.
Source: I am from a family of desi people and have experienced their egotistical nature first hand.
So Qualcomm's Chief Marketing Officer spins self-serving BS. What else is new? Isn't that his job?
But it's Interesting to see he considers himself an engineering expert too. Perhaps in his next emission he'll explain why this mere "marketing gimmick" inspired such purple prose from Gizmodo, not usually considered an Apple fanboi site.
"We just ran benchmarks on Apple's new iPhone 5S, revealing that, yup, this is the dopest smartphone silicon ever made. This thing freaking churns, crushing every other smartphone out there on both computational power and graphics."
Why do people get this wrong all the time! This is not the case in reality. Moving from 1GB DDR2 to 2GB DDR3 can actually result in lowered power consumption (A7 moved to DDR3 whereas A6 was DDR2).
Double the RAM does not have a major impact on battery life. Case in fact, IP4S and IP5 batteries were almost identical mah's but IP5 doubled the 4S 512MB to 1GB.
1) The original comment only mentioned additional RAM, and not differences in types of RAM.
2) Are you sure that 1GB of DDR3 uses less than half the power of 1GB of DDR2 RAM? I've read it's about a 30% difference. Perhaps Apple can tweak that more but do you really think Apple can improve the power savings by more than 160% to get it to a 50% power savings over the DDR2 they use in the iPhone 5/5C? i would bet against it.
You have to compare 64-bit processes to 32-bit on the same hardware. Comparing different hardware doesn't show the advantage of 64-bit instructions on their own. Anandtech tested this and found a small improvement in many cases but an improvement nonetheless in most of the tests.
Small improvements under 50% might seem like a gimmick to some (some who might even dope their own benchmarks to get an extra few %) but it's free performance and future-proof for memory expansion. There's no reason to be against 64-bit unless you'll have trouble implementing it or just playing catchup in which case the course of action is to dismiss people who got there before you.
The A7 would perform much the same for real-world tasks if everything was 32-bit but 64-bit is still better.
Building a 6 lane highway is extremely beneficial. In Los Angeles. In rural Kansas there wouldn't be much need for it and it would probably leave quite a few people scratching their heads as to why someone built it there.
The guy wasn't saying there was zero benefit to 64 bit architecture- he was saying there was zero benefit to 64 bit architecture in Apple's current hardware (his words, not mine).
This analogy doesn't illustrate all the changes is imply with the new ARMv8 architecture, have you read Mike Ash article yet?
With slower clock speeds and fewer cores, Apples efficient design gets the least benefit from going to 64-bit than the busier architectures with more cores and higher speeds would. A 32 bit bus can address four times the memory in iPhone. So building a 64 bit bus with their architecture has left a lot of people scratching their heads as to why and from their view the biggest benefit Apple gets from shifting to 64 bit is their fans have something to cheer about and say 'first'
This illustrate how little your knowledge of CPU architecture really is. How could you sanely said that adding cores gives more benefits than having more powerful core? As for the whole memory addressing craziness, I'll point you to Mike Ash article on how important having 64 bit addressing for allocating object could be even with 1 Gb of ram. Now if you could compare on power efficiency between Apple and Samsung/Qualcomm approach, It would be a lot easier for you to understand the core multiplication and frequency raising is a dead end avenue. This is something Intel has learn in his previous Mhz war with AMD.
Samsung led the charge in 'more cores and higher clock speeds' Apple is leading the charge in bus bits. Either way, to build faster devices they are eventually both going to go with more cores and higher clock speeds, which will demand a bigger 64 bit bus to support the bit transfers. I don't view any of those as particularly 'amazing' Apple has gone the multi core route, and will eventually bump its clock speed up. You won't find me crying that 'Apple copied Samsung! The thieves!' Similarly when Samsung or Qualcomm go 64 bit I'm not going to feel personally mortified that Samsung has stolen anything from Apple (Question: Why is no one screaming Apple copied Intel by going 64 bit? Answer: Its just not that big 'a deal).
LOL, first of all Intel is not the creator 64 bit computing (CRAY was one pioneer), they haven't even created the X86_64 arch, AMD did it first, forcing Intel to use compatible AMD64 ISA in their chips. You know, adding core doesn't help the vast majority of Apps where most are single threaded, you can said apps needs to be optimize to get most of the benefit of a 64bit platform, this is also true when you add core. A very small fraction of Android apps are tweak for quad cores SoC, most Java apps run single threaded.
Him saying there was 'zero benefit' to it was a little extreme in my opinion. Clearly there is a benefit- the 5s is one of the leading rocket ships in the phone speed category. It is 'pretty amazing' in its current incarnation but I really think it is largely just setting things up for the next generation of phones.
Its strange how I've never heard someone downplaying 64 bit architecture in desktop PC, when AMD made its first Athlon 64 10 years ago, no one was saying in that time that Intel P4 was winning with their crazy Ghz against AMD64. I you want my opinion, I mostly prefer having a processor with the best performance per cycle than a overclocked and overheating one. Even Intel has come back to sense since and lower back frequency of all their processor below 3Ghz
You have to compare 64-bit processes to 32-bit on the same hardware. Comparing different hardware doesn't show the advantage of 64-bit instructions on their own. Anandtech tested this and found a small improvement in many cases but an improvement nonetheless in most of the tests.
Small improvements under 50% might seem like a gimmick to some (some who might even dope their own benchmarks to get an extra few %) but it's free performance and future-proof for memory expansion. There's no reason to be against 64-bit unless you'll have trouble implementing it or just playing catchup in which case the course of action is to dismiss people who got there before you.
The A7 would perform much the same for real-world tasks if everything was 32-bit but 64-bit is still better.
The fact that the instruction set for 64-bit has been modernized and Obj-C can heavily benefit from it helps not only in performance but also in power consumption. Even if the benchmarks showed the same performance for a giving speed the power saving alone would still make this benefit for them and their customers.
So Qualcomm's Chief Marketing Officer spins self-serving BS. What else is new? Isn't that his job?
But it's Interesting to see he considers himself an engineering expert too. Perhaps in his next emission he'll explain why this mere "marketing gimmick" inspired such purple prose from Gizmodo, not usually considered an Apple fanboi site.
"We just ran benchmarks on Apple's new iPhone 5S, revealing that, yup, this is the dopest smartphone silicon ever made. This thing freaking churns, crushing every other smartphone out there on both computational power and graphics."
Like they said lets forget the specs and look at the results: Apply came up with a 1.3ghz dual core with 1g ram that is almost 2 times faster than the qualcomm 1.9ghz quad core with 2g of ram.
Building a 6 lane highway is extremely beneficial. In Los Angeles. In rural Kansas there wouldn't be much need for it and it would probably leave quite a few people scratching their heads as to why someone built it there.
The guy wasn't saying there was zero benefit to 64 bit architecture- he was saying there was zero benefit to 64 bit architecture in Apple's current hardware (his words, not mine).
With slower clock speeds and fewer cores, Apples efficient design gets the least benefit from going to 64-bit than the busier architectures with more cores and higher speeds would. A 32 bit bus can address four times the memory in iPhone. So building a 64 bit bus with their architecture has left a lot of people scratching their heads as to why and from their view the biggest benefit Apple gets from shifting to 64 bit is their fans have something to cheer about and say 'first'
That part of "faster with half as many cores and 30% lower clock speed" don't you understand?
The results are impressive. Whether Qualcomm understands them or not is irrelevant.
Who are you going to listen to, Qualcomm who is competing with Apple's 64 bit CPUs with its 32 bit CPUs or me, an app developer who actually writes code for mobile apps? 64 bit is not just for addressing RAM over 4 GB. It is also for virtual address space which turns out to be essential when you have limited amounts of RAM and large data files stored on high speed flash memory. My apps address gigabytes of high resolution vector map data and can do so even on the original iPhone thanks to virtual addressing. Unfortunately the more RAM you have, the more difficult it is to use virtual address space since it quickly becomes fragmented and is limited to much less than 4 GB due to the needs of the operating system.
1) The original comment only mentioned additional RAM, and not differences in types of RAM.
2) Are you sure that 1GB of DDR3 uses less than half the power of 1GB of DDR2 RAM? I've read it's about a 30% difference. Perhaps Apple can tweak that more but do you really think Apple can improve the power savings by more than 160% to get it to a 50% power savings over the DDR2 they use in the iPhone 5/5C? i would bet against it.
Sure they can, by going to a new process and voltage (as they did from A6 to A7).
For example going from 50nm 1.5V 1GB to 20nm 1.35V 1GB can save up to 67% power.
In any case you missed the point. RAM power consumption is not a "major" factor in battery life. Going from 1GB to 2GB is not going to halve your battery life. It will decrease surely but not by any noticeable level.
For example going from 50nm 1.5V 1GB to 20nm 1.35V 1GB can save up to 67% power.
Where is the evidence Apple was using 50nm RAM in the iPhone 5 but then jumped to 20nm RAM for the iPhone 5S?
In any case you missed the point. RAM power consumption is not a "major" factor in battery life. Going from 1GB to 2GB is not going to halve your battery life. It will decrease surely but not by any noticeable level.
Again, even with a drop in power consumption for a smaller node or more efficient RAM you can't simply say Apple can double RAM and end up losing less power unless you have evidence to back it up.
You said, "Why do people get this wrong all the time! This is not the case in reality. Moving from 1GB DDR2 to 2GB DDR3 can actually result in lowered power consumption (A7 moved to DDR3 whereas A6 was DDR2)." If you only mentioned the last line where you say it can as opposed to it will you would be correct in that it can, but you prefaced your comment by saying people are getting it wrong, and they are not.
Where is the evidence Apple was using 50nm RAM in the iPhone 5 but then jumped to 20nm RAM for the iPhone 5S?
Again, even with a drop in power consumption for a smaller node or more efficient RAM you can't simply say Apple can double RAM and end up losing less power unless you have evidence to back it up.
You said, "Why do people get this wrong all the time! This is not the case in reality. Moving from 1GB DDR2 to 2GB DDR3 can actually result in lowered power consumption (A7 moved to DDR3 whereas A6 was DDR2)." If you only mentioned the last line where you say it can as opposed to it will you would be correct in that it can, but you prefaced your comment by saying everyone is wrong, and they are not.
50 - 20 was an example of how it can be done. I didn't state anywhere that apple had actually done it.
Apple actually went from 32nm DDR2 internal DRAM to 28nm DDR3 DRAM between A6 and A7 so if they kept the memory speed the same likely there was a significant power saving while staying at 1G.
I responded to a wide-sweeping comment that more ram means horrible battery life. Sure any idiot could add some very power hungry RAM to a design and screw with battery life but why on earth would anyone do that. If apple decide to go 2GB+ they will do it in a way that has minimal affect on power consumption.
Reread my original reply. IP5 doubled ram from 4S with same battery specs yet only a small difference in battery life (most likely due to the IP5 screen). It can be done and it has been done. Using the lame argument that the reason the 5S doesn't have more memory is because of battery life is just that, lame. Apple had plenty of other reasons not to increase memory size.
I responded to a wide-sweeping comment that more ram means horrible battery life. Sure any idiot could add some very power hungry RAM to a design and screw with battery life but why on earth would anyone do that. If apple decide to go 2GB+ they will do it in a way that has minimal affect on power consumption.
Reread my original reply. IP5 doubled ram from 4S with same battery specs yet only a small difference in battery life (most likely due to the IP5 screen). It can be done and it has been done. Using the lame argument that the reason the 5S doesn't have more memory is because of battery life is just that, lame. Apple had plenty of other reasons not to increase memory size.
That's all true, but your argument doesn't really address the issue, either.
You want to compare 2 GB of DDR2 to 1 GB of DDR2. That isn't a useful comparison. Apple decided to go with DDR3 on the A7. Once that decision was made, they would say "should we use 1 GB or 2 GB?" 2 GB will probably use more energy than 1 GB (although one could probably come up with unusual scenarios where the opposite is true). So Apple's use of 1 GB does save energy compared to 2 GB of the same RAM type.
Using the lame argument that the reason the 5S doesn't have more memory is because of battery life is just that, lame. Apple had plenty of other reasons not to increase memory size.
More of the exact same RAM requires more power. This cannot be debated This is a fact! This is physics!
I don't think anyone here said that the only reason the iPhone 5S didn't get 2GB was due to it eating up too much power. Apple has a long and impressive history of balancing power with performance. The bottom line is that adding more RAM wouldn't have increased the user experience to make it worthwhile for them.
I've said it on MacWorld and I'll say it here. Look at what the Camera app does and then tell me the iPhone 5s doesn't NEED 64bit processing power. A single panorama image is made up of around 10 photos stitched together. But Camera takes 10 images for every 1 so that's 100 photos it's processing before it gives you 1 awesome panoramic photo all within the time it takes to take and save the photo.
The very idea that a mobile device that is pushing deeper and deeper into desktop areas doesn't need more power and that the only advantage of going 64bit is to address more memory is laughable. You'd think someone who develops processors would actually understand this so it leads me to believe that Qualcomm are just visionless idiots who were broadsided by Apple.
If there is no advantage of going to 64bit then why do all Macs built since 2009 have 64bit processors but only come with 4GB RAM? Surely there is no advantage to those machines and yet look at what OS X is able to do with GrandCentral and the like.
Then take the advantage that Apple now only needs to concentrate on one architecture you quickly understand that this is Leopard and Snow Leopard all over again but on the mobile platform. This is a MASSIVE thing for the future of ALL devices of course no one can understand that because they are stuck in the past trying to tread water in the present.
I've said it on MacWorld and I'll say it here. Look at what the Camera app does and then tell me the iPhone 5s doesn't NEED 64bit processing power. A single panorama image is made up of around 10 photos stitched together. But Camera takes 10 images for every 1 so that's 100 photos it's processing before it gives you 1 awesome panoramic photo all within the time it takes to take and save the photo.
The very idea that a mobile device that is pushing deeper and deeper into desktop areas doesn't need more power and that the only advantage of going 64bit is to address more memory is laughable. You'd think someone who develops processors would actually understand this so it leads me to believe that Qualcomm are just visionless idiots who were broadsided by Apple.
If there is no advantage of going to 64bit then why do all Macs built since 2009 have 64bit processors but only come with 4GB RAM? Surely there is no advantage to those machines and yet look at what OS X is able to do with GrandCentral and the like.
Then take the advantage that Apple now only needs to concentrate on one architecture you quickly understand that this is Leopard and Snow Leopard all over again but on the mobile platform. This is a MASSIVE thing for the future of ALL devices of course no one can understand that because they are stuck in the past trying to tread water in the present.
One thing I've mentioned but haven't seen any reporting on are the increased cryptographic aspects to ARM64 over ARM32. I haven't seen anything that would rule out Touch ID only being a reality now because Apple was able to get ARM64 into production. Not just for the security aspect of the secure enclave but perhaps also for the impressively fast processing of the data supplied by the Touch ID sensor.
Comments
Their inability to see past themselves is a trait shared by nearly 99.9% of Indian/Pakistani men. Idiots.
Source: I am from a family of desi people and have experienced their egotistical nature first hand.
But it's Interesting to see he considers himself an engineering expert too. Perhaps in his next emission he'll explain why this mere "marketing gimmick" inspired such purple prose from Gizmodo, not usually considered an Apple fanboi site.
"We just ran benchmarks on Apple's new iPhone 5S, revealing that, yup, this is the dopest smartphone silicon ever made. This thing freaking churns, crushing every other smartphone out there on both computational power and graphics."
http://gizmodo.com/iphone-a7-chip-benchmarks-forget-the-specs-it-blows-e-1350717023
1) The original comment only mentioned additional RAM, and not differences in types of RAM.
2) Are you sure that 1GB of DDR3 uses less than half the power of 1GB of DDR2 RAM? I've read it's about a 30% difference. Perhaps Apple can tweak that more but do you really think Apple can improve the power savings by more than 160% to get it to a 50% power savings over the DDR2 they use in the iPhone 5/5C? i would bet against it.
You have to compare 64-bit processes to 32-bit on the same hardware. Comparing different hardware doesn't show the advantage of 64-bit instructions on their own. Anandtech tested this and found a small improvement in many cases but an improvement nonetheless in most of the tests.
Small improvements under 50% might seem like a gimmick to some (some who might even dope their own benchmarks to get an extra few %) but it's free performance and future-proof for memory expansion. There's no reason to be against 64-bit unless you'll have trouble implementing it or just playing catchup in which case the course of action is to dismiss people who got there before you.
The A7 would perform much the same for real-world tasks if everything was 32-bit but 64-bit is still better.
Building a 6 lane highway is extremely beneficial. In Los Angeles. In rural Kansas there wouldn't be much need for it and it would probably leave quite a few people scratching their heads as to why someone built it there.
The guy wasn't saying there was zero benefit to 64 bit architecture- he was saying there was zero benefit to 64 bit architecture in Apple's current hardware (his words, not mine).
This analogy doesn't illustrate all the changes is imply with the new ARMv8 architecture, have you read Mike Ash article yet?
With slower clock speeds and fewer cores, Apples efficient design gets the least benefit from going to 64-bit than the busier architectures with more cores and higher speeds would. A 32 bit bus can address four times the memory in iPhone. So building a 64 bit bus with their architecture has left a lot of people scratching their heads as to why and from their view the biggest benefit Apple gets from shifting to 64 bit is their fans have something to cheer about and say 'first'
This illustrate how little your knowledge of CPU architecture really is. How could you sanely said that adding cores gives more benefits than having more powerful core? As for the whole memory addressing craziness, I'll point you to Mike Ash article on how important having 64 bit addressing for allocating object could be even with 1 Gb of ram. Now if you could compare on power efficiency between Apple and Samsung/Qualcomm approach, It would be a lot easier for you to understand the core multiplication and frequency raising is a dead end avenue. This is something Intel has learn in his previous Mhz war with AMD.
Samsung led the charge in 'more cores and higher clock speeds' Apple is leading the charge in bus bits. Either way, to build faster devices they are eventually both going to go with more cores and higher clock speeds, which will demand a bigger 64 bit bus to support the bit transfers. I don't view any of those as particularly 'amazing' Apple has gone the multi core route, and will eventually bump its clock speed up. You won't find me crying that 'Apple copied Samsung! The thieves!' Similarly when Samsung or Qualcomm go 64 bit I'm not going to feel personally mortified that Samsung has stolen anything from Apple (Question: Why is no one screaming Apple copied Intel by going 64 bit? Answer: Its just not that big 'a deal).
LOL, first of all Intel is not the creator 64 bit computing (CRAY was one pioneer), they haven't even created the X86_64 arch, AMD did it first, forcing Intel to use compatible AMD64 ISA in their chips. You know, adding core doesn't help the vast majority of Apps where most are single threaded, you can said apps needs to be optimize to get most of the benefit of a 64bit platform, this is also true when you add core. A very small fraction of Android apps are tweak for quad cores SoC, most Java apps run single threaded.
Him saying there was 'zero benefit' to it was a little extreme in my opinion. Clearly there is a benefit- the 5s is one of the leading rocket ships in the phone speed category. It is 'pretty amazing' in its current incarnation but I really think it is largely just setting things up for the next generation of phones.
Its strange how I've never heard someone downplaying 64 bit architecture in desktop PC, when AMD made its first Athlon 64 10 years ago, no one was saying in that time that Intel P4 was winning with their crazy Ghz against AMD64. I you want my opinion, I mostly prefer having a processor with the best performance per cycle than a overclocked and overheating one. Even Intel has come back to sense since and lower back frequency of all their processor below 3Ghz
The fact that the instruction set for 64-bit has been modernized and Obj-C can heavily benefit from it helps not only in performance but also in power consumption. Even if the benchmarks showed the same performance for a giving speed the power saving alone would still make this benefit for them and their customers.
So Qualcomm's Chief Marketing Officer spins self-serving BS. What else is new? Isn't that his job?
But it's Interesting to see he considers himself an engineering expert too. Perhaps in his next emission he'll explain why this mere "marketing gimmick" inspired such purple prose from Gizmodo, not usually considered an Apple fanboi site.
"We just ran benchmarks on Apple's new iPhone 5S, revealing that, yup, this is the dopest smartphone silicon ever made. This thing freaking churns, crushing every other smartphone out there on both computational power and graphics."
http://gizmodo.com/iphone-a7-chip-benchmarks-forget-the-specs-it-blows-e-1350717023
Like they said lets forget the specs and look at the results: Apply came up with a 1.3ghz dual core with 1g ram that is almost 2 times faster than the qualcomm 1.9ghz quad core with 2g of ram.
To be fair, with only 1GB or RAM there is a limit as to how much of an advantage a 64 bit OS really is at this point....
However, it does sound like sour grapes at this point....
That part of "faster with half as many cores and 30% lower clock speed" don't you understand?
The results are impressive. Whether Qualcomm understands them or not is irrelevant.
64 bit is not just for addressing RAM over 4 GB. It is also for virtual address space which turns out to be essential when you have limited amounts of RAM and large data files stored on high speed flash memory. My apps address gigabytes of high resolution vector map data and can do so even on the original iPhone thanks to virtual addressing. Unfortunately the more RAM you have, the more difficult it is to use virtual address space since it quickly becomes fragmented and is limited to much less than 4 GB due to the needs of the operating system.
There are a lot of great comments in this thread about 64-bit and RAM that I think you should read.
1) The original comment only mentioned additional RAM, and not differences in types of RAM.
2) Are you sure that 1GB of DDR3 uses less than half the power of 1GB of DDR2 RAM? I've read it's about a 30% difference. Perhaps Apple can tweak that more but do you really think Apple can improve the power savings by more than 160% to get it to a 50% power savings over the DDR2 they use in the iPhone 5/5C? i would bet against it.
Sure they can, by going to a new process and voltage (as they did from A6 to A7).
For example going from 50nm 1.5V 1GB to 20nm 1.35V 1GB can save up to 67% power.
In any case you missed the point. RAM power consumption is not a "major" factor in battery life. Going from 1GB to 2GB is not going to halve your battery life. It will decrease surely but not by any noticeable level.
Where is the evidence Apple was using 50nm RAM in the iPhone 5 but then jumped to 20nm RAM for the iPhone 5S?
Again, even with a drop in power consumption for a smaller node or more efficient RAM you can't simply say Apple can double RAM and end up losing less power unless you have evidence to back it up.
You said, "Why do people get this wrong all the time! This is not the case in reality. Moving from 1GB DDR2 to 2GB DDR3 can actually result in lowered power consumption (A7 moved to DDR3 whereas A6 was DDR2)." If you only mentioned the last line where you say it can as opposed to it will you would be correct in that it can, but you prefaced your comment by saying people are getting it wrong, and they are not.
Flash memory is usually addressed as a kind of disk device (via file system). It is not directly addressable through the CPU memory bus.
Where is the evidence Apple was using 50nm RAM in the iPhone 5 but then jumped to 20nm RAM for the iPhone 5S?
Again, even with a drop in power consumption for a smaller node or more efficient RAM you can't simply say Apple can double RAM and end up losing less power unless you have evidence to back it up.
You said, "Why do people get this wrong all the time! This is not the case in reality. Moving from 1GB DDR2 to 2GB DDR3 can actually result in lowered power consumption (A7 moved to DDR3 whereas A6 was DDR2)." If you only mentioned the last line where you say it can as opposed to it will you would be correct in that it can, but you prefaced your comment by saying everyone is wrong, and they are not.
50 - 20 was an example of how it can be done. I didn't state anywhere that apple had actually done it.
Apple actually went from 32nm DDR2 internal DRAM to 28nm DDR3 DRAM between A6 and A7 so if they kept the memory speed the same likely there was a significant power saving while staying at 1G.
I responded to a wide-sweeping comment that more ram means horrible battery life. Sure any idiot could add some very power hungry RAM to a design and screw with battery life but why on earth would anyone do that. If apple decide to go 2GB+ they will do it in a way that has minimal affect on power consumption.
Reread my original reply. IP5 doubled ram from 4S with same battery specs yet only a small difference in battery life (most likely due to the IP5 screen). It can be done and it has been done. Using the lame argument that the reason the 5S doesn't have more memory is because of battery life is just that, lame. Apple had plenty of other reasons not to increase memory size.
That's all true, but your argument doesn't really address the issue, either.
You want to compare 2 GB of DDR2 to 1 GB of DDR2. That isn't a useful comparison. Apple decided to go with DDR3 on the A7. Once that decision was made, they would say "should we use 1 GB or 2 GB?" 2 GB will probably use more energy than 1 GB (although one could probably come up with unusual scenarios where the opposite is true). So Apple's use of 1 GB does save energy compared to 2 GB of the same RAM type.
More of the exact same RAM requires more power. This cannot be debated This is a fact! This is physics!
I don't think anyone here said that the only reason the iPhone 5S didn't get 2GB was due to it eating up too much power. Apple has a long and impressive history of balancing power with performance. The bottom line is that adding more RAM wouldn't have increased the user experience to make it worthwhile for them.
The very idea that a mobile device that is pushing deeper and deeper into desktop areas doesn't need more power and that the only advantage of going 64bit is to address more memory is laughable. You'd think someone who develops processors would actually understand this so it leads me to believe that Qualcomm are just visionless idiots who were broadsided by Apple.
If there is no advantage of going to 64bit then why do all Macs built since 2009 have 64bit processors but only come with 4GB RAM? Surely there is no advantage to those machines and yet look at what OS X is able to do with GrandCentral and the like.
Then take the advantage that Apple now only needs to concentrate on one architecture you quickly understand that this is Leopard and Snow Leopard all over again but on the mobile platform. This is a MASSIVE thing for the future of ALL devices of course no one can understand that because they are stuck in the past trying to tread water in the present.
One thing I've mentioned but haven't seen any reporting on are the increased cryptographic aspects to ARM64 over ARM32. I haven't seen anything that would rule out Touch ID only being a reality now because Apple was able to get ARM64 into production. Not just for the security aspect of the secure enclave but perhaps also for the impressively fast processing of the data supplied by the Touch ID sensor.