Following the announcement of Apple’s iPhone 5s, which has new 64-bit A7 CPU, Samsung boss JK Shin has told the Korean press that its future handsets will also include 64-bit chipset too.
Acording to the Korea Times, the Samsung co-CEO confirmed that “our next smartphones will have 64-bit processing functionality,” but added that these devices would not be arriving “in the shortest time.”
It’s no secret that mobile chip giant ARM has 64-bit architectures in the pipeline, so will the Galaxy S5 be one of the first Android devices to implement this technology ?
We’ll wait and see
Source Korean Times
64-bit architectures in the pipeline?! ARM have had 64-bit designs available since 2011 I believe… And seeing as the A7 is ARM-based, wouldn’t that really require ARM to already have this available?
The A7 is a SOC with a 64-bit ARM processor. I’d imagine they are a bit ahead of the curve with their mobile processing power, but it’d surprise me if the others are too far behind. I guess it’s just a case of the likes of one of the big manufacturers such as Qualcomm releasing an equivalent SOC (except this would probably be 4 or 6 core, as opposed to the 2 in the A7).
Personally, I think the fact this is 64-bit makes little difference. Of course, 64-bit bandwidth can make some difference in speed, but few apps would be optimised for this. Also, an increase in bus-width often conforms to the law of diminishing returns – you’ll see much less of a performance increase even on optimised apps and OSs.
The main thing a 64-bit architecture brings to the party is hugely increased memory addressing, which basically means the OS can address more than 4GB of RAM. Now, the iPhone, I dare say, does not have 4GB of RAM, so this is a bit of a misnomer also. Very few apps consume this kind of memory either, so until we start to see highly complex applications on mobile devices, it’s pretty much a useless feature.
When the iPhone 21 comes along with a 20 terapixel holographic display, a quantum image capture system, a full-body biometric identification system and 64 petabytes of storage to go along with it all, this kind of memory addressing will start to become important 😉 Slight exaggeration, but you see what I’m getting at.
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