Qualcomm Backs Off 'Marketing Gimmick' Comments About the A7's 64-Bit Benefits

[alexgowers]

wow CMO... wow.

Am I the only one who just wants all these companies to stop talking **** about apple?

Working for a chip manufacturer that is in the same game as apple making basically the exact same chip wouldn't you just keep your mouth closed and let your products and marketing speak for themselves.

Neither faster processors, nor more cores, nor more bits is ever going to win the race, it's a combo of this and much more things that bring power.

I honestly believe 64 bit is actually a much much much bigger deal than even apple made it out to be. The possibilities with ipads is enormous, we really will start to see them as laptop replacements soon.

 

[john123]

So I guess all the people defending him in the thread take it back?

I stick by my original comments, actually. As described in detail in that thread, much of the debate ended up being about semantics and what people mean when they use the term "64-bit." I'd be willing to bet that if you could ask their CMO (and get a frank answer), he'd probably stand by the text of what he said (albeit perhaps not the spirit) but acknowledge that from a marketing perspective, he created a giant hole for himself.

 

[SPUY767]

Like others have said I really don't think we will see the difference now or even next gen but you might as well prepare for the future.

Except, you can see the difference today. From a programmer, any app that needs to handle computation using high precision or large integers immediately gets a huge increase in performance doing those computations.

 

[firewood]

As described in detail in that thread, much of the debate ended up being about semantics and what people mean when they use the term "64-bit."

We meant armv8 or Apple's arm64, as there are no other existing 64-bit ARM architectures.

And my benchmarks say arm64 is faster than armv7s on lots of types of code, likely lower power as well in iOS devices.

 

[iSee]

I think you're all missing the point. Sure, this guy sounds stupid to you and me, but we represent a negligible portion of the market. The 99.99% of people who have no idea what a microprocessor does heard "marketing gimmick" and many of them believe it. Yes, even now, and they will months from now. A footnote correcting his statement won't be heard. He got what he wanted.

I think you are the one missing the point.

Qualcomm will soon begin selling 64-bit chips. The people who believed him today are likely to continue to continue to believe 64-bit is a marketing gimmick in the future, just as you say. So while those people might be less inclined to buy an iPhone today, they'll be equally disinclined to buy a phone with a 64-bit Qualcomm processor in it in the future. Ultimately this notion hurts Qualcomm as much as it does Apple. Probably more because Apple sells an entire UX of which the processor is just a part, while Qualcomm sells the processors.

If he wanted to knock Apple what he should have said was something like, "64-bit processors are very important to the future of mobile computing... but Apple's first effort was rushed, lacking the features and performance of the Qualcomm processors we are working on."

 

[lilo777]

We meant armv8 or Apple's arm64, as there are no other existing 64-bit ARM architectures.

And my benchmarks say arm64 is faster than armv7s on lots of types of code, likely lower power as well in iOS devices.

But technically speaking it is BS. Apple does not advertise arm64 they advertise 64 bitness of their CPU which are two different things. Intel 32 bit chip (and even arm 32 bit chip) may have all those extra hardware accelerations without being arm64.

Qualcomm just did not want to be involved in educating the customers (especially given the fact that they will be release their own 64 bit chips soon). Consider their approach to that of Apple (dismissing phones with screens bigger than 3.5" and tablets smaller than iPad). Apple never admits that their statements were BS.

 

[Mr Bigs]

So I guess all the people defending him in the thread take it back?

Some of us like myself still agree with him,he just really didn't need to say it.

 

[devinci99]

One of the biggest advantage of going 64-bit earlier (versus later) is to give your platform's developer a first go-to market outlet to move their code into 64 bit.

History shown developers aren't really quick to move everything from 32bit to 64bit, when 32bit is still decent.

Apple's iphone 5S sales might be the muscle and incentive developers need to move their code optimize or not. This type of early adoption might give iOS a performance lead later on.

With smartphones passing 1GB RAM and quickly approaching 3GB to 4GB... it would make sens to be on top of that; rather than wait for it to come, and try to move into 64bit before your O/S can fully take advantage it.

In a year or 2, mobile devices will hit 2GB to 3GB RAM easily; and maybe even 4GB. In another year... maybe 4GB is possible --- at the current rate.

Any company who isn't ready 64bit mobile by that time may regret not following Apple.

 

[ezekielrage_99]

Well that didn't take long for that backflip. Qualcomm are an acrobatic bunch.

 

[kdarling]

"The comments made by Anand Chandrasekher, Qualcomm CMO, about 64-bit computing were inaccurate," said a Qualcomm spokesperson in an email. "The mobile hardware and software ecosystem is already moving in the direction of 64-bit...

Marketing person comments on something technical and is totally wrong. Nothing to see here.

This. Moreover, at least Qualcomm corrected his mistake.

Imagine if Apple had been upfront enough to make the kind of same corrections, every time Jobs tried to diss his competition with factually incorrect claims.

"The comments made by Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, about smaller tablets being no good because you'd have to sandpaper your fingertips down, were inaccurate," said an Apple spokesperson in an email. "The mobile hardware and software ecosystem is already moving in the direction of tablets of various sizes, such as with our iPad mini."

And so forth.

 

[Windlasher]

Really!

Funny that in the last week the competition had made some really stupid comments. 1st Eric from google and now this guy. Why can they just concentrate on making their own crap instead of slamming others?

 

[ShinySteelRobot]

Last week, Qualcomm chief marketing officer Anand Chandrasekher called Apple's new 64-bit A7 processor a "marketing gimmick" and claimed the processor had very few consumer-driven features.

...after which Anand Chandrasekher went on to say that nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM and that New Coke is the future of colas.

 

[mnpmnp]

I think you are the one missing the point.

Qualcomm will soon begin selling 64-bit chips. The people who believed him today are likely to continue to continue to believe 64-bit is a marketing gimmick in the future, just as you say. So while those people might be less inclined to buy an iPhone today, they'll be equally disinclined to buy a phone with a 64-bit Qualcomm processor in it in the future. Ultimately this notion hurts Qualcomm as much as it does Apple. Probably more because Apple sells an entire UX of which the processor is just a part, while Qualcomm sells the processors.

If he wanted to knock Apple what he should have said was something like, "64-bit processors are very important to the future of mobile computing... but Apple's first effort was rushed, lacking the features and performance of the Qualcomm processors we are working on."

You are thinking too much

 

[Jimmy James]

64 bit is an important move, even if we're not seeing the entirety of the benefit yet.

 

[cppguy]

As of today 64-bit addresses are not yet necessary, because there's no phone with more than 4GB of RAM. That much is true. However, 64-bit ARM has a much improved instruction set and other optimizations, which aren't gimmick at all. Within 2-3 years, the 32-bit address space won't be sufficient anymore, and we don't really want to design yet another instruction set from scratch. ARM64 is the future, even though part of the design isn't fully utilized yet.

When Apple first released their 64-bit Mac OS, very few people had more than 4GB RAM. Yet no one questions now that it was a good decision. Take a look at the mess that Microsoft did: Program Files (x86), SysWOW64, splwow64 (32-bit application to 64-bit printer driver interface), registry replication, and you'll realize that Apple's transition was much smoother, even though Adobe was stuck with the old Carbon APIs for longer than expected. You want to give 3rd parties enough time to transition. By the time 4GB will be a necessity, everyone will be familiar with the new architecture.

 

[fertilized-egg]

So I guess all the people defending him in the thread take it back?

No I fully expect them to either ignore the issue, or try to dilute the issue by saying Steve Jobs used to make wrong statements all the time and never apologized for them, the good old "we were wrong in this case but Steve Jobs was wrong in other issues too so Apple is still in the wrong and they are still doomed" defence.

edit: holy crap. Right after writing this, I saw someone DID do exactly that in this page. I don't know if I should be surprised.

 

[technowar]

Now it feels like,

'Apple released a 64bit phone, meh! Gimmicky!'
'Oh X manufacturer released a 64bit phone (after Apple), woo! This is the real deal!'

 

[HitchHykr]

I think you're all missing the point. Sure, this guy sounds stupid to you and me, but we represent a negligible portion of the market. The 99.99% of people who have no idea what a microprocessor does heard "marketing gimmick" and many of them believe it. Yes, even now, and they will months from now. A footnote correcting his statement won't be heard. He got what he wanted.

The 99.99% of the people that have no idea what a microprocessor does have not heard the statement from the Qualcomm's CMO much less know the difference between Qualcomm or Quizno's or Quodoba, etc, etc.

 

[wovel]

Always fun when the marketing guy gets a public smack-down from the product development folks.

 

[seek3r]

This has been discussed ad nauseum now. The 64 bit ARM is so much more then a 64-bit addressing space. It is FACT that the A64 instruction set provides performance gains over the AArch32 instruction set for many applications, and it has been proven by the benchmarks. People who claim that ARMv8 is a 'gimmick' simply show that they have no idea about ARM CPU architecture whatsoever.

Exactly! The performance gains are similar to AMD64s initial bump, where it was the added registers introduced in the spec that made most of the difference (even more important in this case since the major advantage of 64 bit by itself is only the addressable space, and it's not a problem on mobile devices right now). The problem is it's easier to focus on the "64" (hey, twice as good as 32, right? ) than it is to focus on changes brought in the new instruction set - and that leads to people calling it a gimmick, since that particular argument is

 

[i.mac]

Now it feels like,

'Apple released a 64bit phone, meh! Gimmicky!'
'Oh X manufacturer released a 64bit phone (after Apple), woo! This is the real deal!'

And when samedung releases a bit wise copy of the same, folks will declare such a feat 'true innovation'.

 

[mamcx]

But technically speaking it is BS.

NOT. And the same *makers* of that kind of tech say it's not, and the contrary is a *mistake* by his own admission.

Intel 32 bit chip (and even arm 32 bit chip) may have all those extra hardware accelerations without being arm64.

But they don't. And neither have it the ARM 32 bit SOCs. The ARM64 is not defined just by the addressable space, is a new arch. So your logic is: Removing everything else that make a ARM 64 BIT SOC, as truly, right now, is made of, then of course, is BS?

You can say Apple oversimplify his message and pick among several characteristics the only one that vaguely could have a impact in the average mind. That is a fair point.

But not call it BS. People that know not do that. Neither Qualcomm.

 

[waldobushman]

What is with Qualcomm? Is their CMO an idiot? What's his problem?

The CMO should be in the running for the 2013 Steve Ballmer award.

----------

What a fool. Clearly Qualcomm hires B players.

His job is to collect paychecks. Has no idea what business Qualcomm is in.

 

[Bahroo]

Eat that crow qualcomm

 

[Windlasher]

SOme Dude

I remember back in the early 90s, listening to NPR and they were having this debate about the internet. The number of people using it back then was just reaching the millions. There was this guy who was so pissed that we were wasting time and money on it "cause no one is really using it"

I really wish I could remember who he was.