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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