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Developers Now Permitted to Submit 64-Bit Apps for iPhone 5s
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And yet still no word of 64 bit Android. We're so far ahead of them it's hysterical.If you want 64 bit desktop performance on your mobile there is only one player in town.
I was gonna at first vote up your comment from a technical perspective, but after taking a brief look at your posting history I'm convinced you're crazy.
64bit programs, retina display and only 16GB storage do not go well together. I guess there will be a lot of user exchanging their 16GB iPhone 5s for a 32 or 64GB. Really.
Yep.
Most "explaining" about the benefits of 64 bits come to this simple statement: the app can use > 4 GB of RAM, which definitely is a must nowadays.
It seems quite logical that once many apps require 64 bits, the OS and therefore all the rest of the apps should be 64 bits, making the system 100% 64 bits. That seems clean and neat to me.
Since it's in the iPhone, I read this:
IIRC (If I Read Correctly) the iPhone 5s doesn't take advantage of having a 64 bits CPU, but this 64 bits CPU (A7) is faster because of increased core count, higher clock speed and improved GPU.
So, actually the same "statement" as above.
The 64 "bit-ness" signals the way forward. From now-on we're thinking 64 bits here. A few generations of iPhones / iPads from now, Apple will be first to be 100% 64 bits. And by that time the RAM consumption for an app can probably exceed 4 GB....
A bit like the introduction of the G5.
And why are we seeing android apps which do not run on MTK processors for example?
I've never seen a 64-bit executable that's twice the size of a 32-bit one. They're usually bigger, but not by that much.
Thank you for spelling it out so succinctly. The A7 is an excellent upgrade, but none of its features are directly due to its inherit 64-bitness. It'd perform almost exactly the same were it a 32-bit processor. Everything everyone keeps going on about, like "oooh, double the registers", and whatnot. That's all physical chip design, and has practically nothing to do with the bitness of the processor.
64-bit is for future proofing. Nothing less. Nothing more. There are literally zero apps out at the moment that truly need it, and there won't be for a few years yet. Apple's doing it mostly because they think it's better to get it out of the way now rather than waiting til later.
For anyone who comes in and says "Android sucks, they don't even have 64-bits", keep in mind the mantra that usually gets thrown around about how specs don't matter, and that 64-bit on mobile is (at the moment) about as useful as Samsung's octo-core processors.
Unfortunately it's a statement that is very possibly wrong. Unless some definitive news has broken in the last 24 hours that I've missed then we don't know whether the A7 has increased the core count up from the dual cores of previous A-series parts. Many people suspect that the A7 still has a dual core CPU and Apple's claims of twice the performance are down to a possible 31% increase in clock speed, some general speedups from each core going up to 64-bit, and possibly Apple's performance claims being based on particular types of activity that will particularly benefit from the new architecture (cherry picking the benchmarks).
We'll know soon enough about the core count because there are people who tear apart a sample of every new iPhone released and X-ray the SoC (A7 in this case). It tends to be very easy to see from the x-rays exactly how the chip is laid out and to work out how many cores it has.
There is a Marvell Technology Group? Interesting.Look up the Intel XScale series.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_XScale
Well I don't doubt that Intel made ARM Chips exist somewhere. I just don't think Intel wants to compete on the basis of intellectual property they don't own and every competitor can license to undercut prices. And almost every smartphone maker also makes laptops and therefore is used to pay Intels monopoly prices. They don't want Intel in their new business either. They have an interest in ARM chips remaining a commodity.
The iPhone going 64-bit doesn't make Intel chips in the iPhone any more likely. AMD/Intel x64 and ARM AArch64 are two very different beasts, technologically as well as business-wise.
Your link doesn't help to proof your point. Yes "Bay Trail" Intels Atom SoC with a x86-64 instruction set could potentially bring 64-bit to Android.
Problems:
smartphones with Intel cpus do not sell very well
smartphone makers have no interest in another Intel monopoly
smartphones with ARM cpus continue to dominate
ARM chips are going in another 64-bit direction
There you have it: FRAGMENTATION !!!
Two completely different 64-bit architectures compete to become the next hardware platform for Android. Thats what you get for being open: FORMAT WARS. Like the one that hindered high-definition optical discs to become a standard before streaming emerged as a solution for content delivery.
Meanwhile Apple announced nothing. They just reported completion of a secret development project. The 64-bit chips are already build into all iPhones 5S. The whole iOS and all the Apple apps are already 64-bit. The development environment Xcode is ready to compile 64-bit code and developers can now submit 64-bit third party apps to the AppStore. Millions of 64-bit iPhones are just three days away from selling.
Not being ahead of competition M.Y. A.S.S.
What other direction is there? 64-bit is 64-bit. Are you talking about a different instruction set from x86? Why? They're already different anyway. How is anything any different from what's gone on before?
Before:
AArch32 | x86
After:
AArch32 | AArch64 | x86 | x86-64
Now you have four different compile targets for Android apps. And developers already suffered from hardware fragmentation when virtually all Android phones had 32-bit ARM chips in them. You can't test against all variants of Android smartphones. So you always only test against the most common ones and those have 32-bit ARM cpus in them. Thats the target most Android apps will continue to be developed for.
Much like mp3 is still the most common music format every device accepts in an open world of independent manufacturers, 32-bit ARM apps for phone-sized screens will remain the bread and butter of Android for a long time if not for ever. In just one year every new iPhone except the cheapest free-with-contract one will have a 64-bit ARM cpu. 32-bit mode only exists for backward compatibility, but the technology itself is discontinued by Apple.
Before:
AArch32 (Apple designed A6)
After:
AArch64 (Apple designed A7)
In Android land companies will continue to make phones with all kinds of cpus as long as someone is buying them. In the end they are still making pc mainboards with colored PS/2 ports, your 1987 state-of-the-art interface. Especially as the benefit of 64-bitness in a phone is not immediately obvious to everyone, do not expect it to become universally adopted very soon.
It won't be quite that bad, because I'm sure Google would provide a compatibility layer (much as iOS7 is doing now) to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit OS. Developers won't have to compile an app for every single architecture.
edit: though I'm sure there will come a point when 64-bit CPUs will become cheap enough they're provided even in the lowest of the low end Android phones.
If it won't compile, you won't get a binary.
The Mac that runs the Xcode that builds the binary is 64bit. If you read the guide that Apple has released to developers (I am one) the details are there on how to build the proper binaries.
Once built, you test it in the simulator which I am sure is capable of 32 and 64 bit operation seeing that it runs on a 64 bit machine.
The only downside I see is not actually testing it on a real device.
Apple are loosing the plot.
Apple are fast loosing the plot. The Manta of Jobs, was less is more. Meaning in not trying to keep up with everyone else, chasing their tails, implementing new technology less that perfectly, is being thrown out..
Who needs 64bit on a phone? The downside, of bloated apps, heating issues, battery hit, will erode the usefulness of the phone... I already found that switching from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 5; had a real hit on battery performance. Meaning, that the phone's battery vanishes far quicker doing mundane tasks that it did on the iPhone 4.
Also, Maps, although much improved fro it's launch is pretty damn useless now, when not on a 3G network... Rural UK only has 2G networks most of the time. on the iPhone 4 IOS 5 maps, it worked just fine. Now unless you have 3G, forget it! Even with map caching, it dumps the cache when you finish a route, so on 2G, you can't look something else up. as it will not reload the maps.. utter *****!
Apple you ARE loosing the plot... Steve Jobs, will be turning in his grave!
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In Snow Leopard we has Rosetta; which kept legacy apps happy for a while; Although the computability layer had a big CPU hit; which meant that unless you were connected to the mains, I didn't bother running half of the old stuff, and I didn't see why I should have to pay $100 for updates on Apps; just to have what I had before, so I ditched some stuff when Lion came out and Rosetta was pulled.
Apple are fast loosing the plot. The Manta of Jobs, was less is more. Meaning in not trying to keep up with everyone else, chasing their tails, implementing new technology less that perfectly, is being thrown out..
Who needs 64bit on a phone? The downside, of bloated apps, heating issues, battery hit, will erode the usefulness of the phone... I already found that switching from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 5; had a real hit on battery performance. Meaning, that the phone's battery vanishes far quicker doing mundane tasks that it did on the iPhone 4.
Also, Maps, although much improved fro it's launch is pretty damn useless now, when not on a 3G network... Rural UK only has 2G networks most of the time. on the iPhone 4 IOS 5 maps, it worked just fine. Now unless you have 3G, forget it! Even with map caching, it dumps the cache when you finish a route, so on 2G, you can't look something else up. as it will not reload the maps.. utter *****!
Apple you ARE loosing the plot... Steve Jobs, will be turning in his grave!
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In Snow Leopard we has Rosetta; which kept legacy apps happy for a while; Although the computability layer had a big CPU hit; which meant that unless you were connected to the mains, I didn't bother running half of the old stuff, and I didn't see why I should have to pay $100 for updates on Apps; just to have what I had before, so I ditched some stuff when Lion came out and Rosetta was pulled.
Where have you been, Samsungs next generation of phones will be 64 bit which is like 5 minutes away.And yet still no word of 64 bit Android. We're so far ahead of them it's hysterical.
funny, that isnt what the actual experts on iOS say...apple, chair, etc..
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no.
i dont doubt that ARM laptops could be in the future, but the memory limitation is only one benefit of 64-bit computing. there are real-world gains today for 64-bit apps.
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I agree with you - but that's how Apple makes you buy new *****
nobody makes you do anything. and idevices are known for their long life spans. my family is still using my ipad1, ipad2, iphone 4, etc...
Looks like that's probably new. On iTunes 11 I'm seeing cpu use go up to about 175% on an eight core mac pro. If 11.1 uses more cores that's a good thing although it should have happened years ago.
Mr Bigs said:
Not sure if you are serious or sarcastic. Samsung has announced 64 bit phones in the future (although they're vaporware at this point until they give more specifics). But there has been no announcement of 64 bit android to run on that hardware. Maybe Google has been working on it, maybe not, but they haven't made anything public yet.
The problem is neither technological nor pricewise. Its a general lack of leadership in open platforms. When Apple drops a technology no other OEM can decide that, we feel our customers still benefit from optical drives and therefore we will continue to build them into our Macs. Apple has full control over the progress of their platforms and can decide which technologies they want to support in the future (think Adobe Flash).
All 64-bit architectures are designed to provide backwards compatibility with 32-bit apps. Thats the main reason why they are 64-bit and not 62 or 66 bit. But the transition only happens if at some point everyone agrees to drop the old and go with the new. PS/2 ports are not any cheaper than USB ports. But as long as keyboard makers are using them, there is a reason to keep the port on motherboards. And as long as those ports exist on motherboards, there is a reason to make even more PS/2 keyboards.
Its a chicken egg problem, it doesn't go away until someone kills the chicken and breaks the egg. Sinking egg prices do not solve it. Apple introduced the Lightning port on September 12, 2012. Now just one year later there are only three legacy products left that have the old Dock Connector port: the iPod classic, the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4S. Ancient hardware no one is designing new peripherals for. You know its over.
No one in the Android world has the power to end a widespread standard interface like USB and replace it with a symmetrical plug let alone within one year. All they can do, is shrink the same plug even further without ever breaking compatibility. Mini-USB, Micro-USB, Nano-USB, Pico-USB, Femto-USB and so on. Thats the kind of progress possible as long as everything shall always work together with everything else.
That's a slightly different situation. Rosetta was more like an emulator or virtual machine, running code from one entirey different CPU architecture on another. Since 32-bit applications can execute natively on 64-bit x86 and ARM chips, the compatibility layer is less an emulator, more a set of libraries nested inside the OS so it can launch 32-bit applications in a 64-bit environment. The biggest performance hit you can expect is a 1-2% difference.
I will take two examples.
Applications that act on certain kinds of data, such as images where each pixel consists of three colors, each defined with at least 8 bit accuracy. That's 32 bit right that, for each pixel. And let's try doing some manipulation, like transparency and position in 3D, you'll see that it'd be nice to have more bits to define all characteristics on that pixel. Doing 32-bit arithmetic on it will force the programmer to do stuff like split it into sub pixels to fit everything around in the processor, and doing multiple passes on each color and fitting them back again to a complete pixel. With 64-bit instructions and registers one could do it on a complete pixel in one go.
This will be similar on all kinds of computing doing on data that's defined in chunks of about 32-bits (or more). Video, audio, databases Speeds will increase even if the total dataset doesn't require 4 GB RAM.
Another reason is memory management. Even if the iOS device doesn't have more than 1 GB of RAM, and each app doesn't get more than 4 GB of virtual memory, all apps will probably together get a total amount of RAM that will exceed 4 GB. The virtual memory manager makes all the juggling of the overlapping address spaces and that takes some effort on the operating system's part. If each app could get it's unique little chunk in 64-bit memory space, the memory manager won't have to do as much juggling just translating memory addresses. That's why a 64-bit OS on 64-bit hardware will speed up 32-bit apps running even with less than 4 GB RAM.
A third reason why 64-bit is better in this particular case is that the 32-bit ARMv7 instruction set is getting a old. The new ARMv8 instruction set is more efficient, powerful and includes new instructions that will make an ARMv8 processor faster, even if we don't take its 64-bitness in account.
PowerPC as an instruction set didn't get any particular boost by going 64-bit since it was designed for a 64-bit future from day one. ARM and x86 was never intended to be 64-bit so when these instruction sets eventually made the jump they took the opportunity to learn form history and make stuff better and chuck out old cruft that wasn't necessary. Thus is the ARMv8 and x86-64 are better as instruction sets since they are more modern than their predecessors. Spec wise ARMv8 looks pretty similar to what PowerPC did in the middle of 90's