Qualcomm Employee: 64-Bit A7 Chip 'Hit Us In The Gut'

[Max(IT)]

Uh they added RAM in order to add core functionality. Samsung added RAM to accommodate for BS nobody needs like Knox and MyMagazine. iPhone 4 running Siri was terrible (jailbreak, but real Siri). Did it work? Sure it did. But did it work reliably? I've had an iPhone 4 and I had that hack installed and Siri had a hard time understanding speech. The 4S indeed had better audio handling whether it be an audio chip or better microphones.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/06/why_iphone_4_wont_get_siri/

iPhone has a third of the RAM, half the cores, about half the clocks, and less than half the battery capacity of my Note 3, yet it is: faster, smoother, and lasts about as long if not longer according to Anandtech. Apple knows optimization more than anybody else, especially a company like Samsung who are famous for packing on a ridiculous amount of bloat ware (400MB of it on the Note 3 to be more specific).

Sure adding fancier hardware might do the trick but it's making the most out of available resources that is the way forward, not cramming in an Octacore and a laptop battery because of the 400MB of unneeded apps that are piled on top of that already tragic JIT Dalvik.

Very good analysis, and more appreciable since you are a Note 3 owner ...
By the way I can add I'm a little bit disappointed by the choice to stay on the 1 Gb decision for their latest hardware (I'm speaking about iPhone 5S/rMini/Air generation).
It was the right time to jump ship for the 2 Gb.
I usually criticize everyone speaking about planned obsolescence in this forum, but this time I think is sort of.
iPad Air and Mini Retina with 2 Gb are just "too good" ...
My two cents (and I'm perfectly happy with my 5S and my Air).

 

[roadbloc]

64bit is ridiculous in my opinion, most people don't need it on a PC, never mind a phone. But, whatever gets the fans drooling and the phones selling I guess. And so they can have an excuse to make the rest of their phones obsolete when iOS 8 is released

 

[mKTank]

Very good analysis, and more appreciable since you are a Note 3 owner ...
By the way I can add I'm a little bit disappointed by the choice to stay on the 1 Gb decision for their latest hardware (I'm speaking about iPhone 5S/rMini/Air generation).
It was the right time to jump ship for the 2 Gb.
I usually criticize everyone speaking about planned obsolescence in this forum, but this time I think is sort of.
iPad Air and Mini Retina with 2 Gb are just "too good" ...
My two cents (and I'm perfectly happy with my 5S and my Air).

I think for iPad, definitely it should have been 2GB at least. But for iPhone, I don't know, I've never run into any RAM-related issues. Safari seems to be pretty decent in terms of keeping tabs on the iPhone at least. But this is it. Next iPhone needs more for sure.

Oh, and I traded my Note 3 for a 5S. Home sweet home. I guess Android's terrible web browsers are what did it for me.

Might need to update my sig I guess.



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64bit is ridiculous in my opinion, most people don't need it on a PC, never mind a phone. But, whatever gets the fans drooling and the phones selling I guess. And so they can have an excuse to make the rest of their phones obsolete when iOS 8 is released

Look up some benchmarks before entirely dismissing a technology you appear to not be very familiar with.

 

[Renzatic]

Look up some benchmarks before entirely dismissing a technology you appear to not be very familiar with.

64-bit on ARM is a weird damn thing. It's not so much the 64-bitness in and of itself that makes it so fast, so much as it's an entirely new, much more robust instruction set that's been tied to a 64-bit architecture exclusively that gives the processor such impressive gains.

If Apple made a 64-bit processor based on the old processor model tweaked to handle 64-bit instructions, the gains wouldn't be nearly as impressive as what you're seeing now. In fact, those new instructions could, in theory, be tied to 32-bit, and you'd still see about the same gains.

 

[kdarling]

Uh they added RAM in order to add core functionality. Samsung added RAM to accommodate for BS nobody needs like Knox and MyMagazine.

You mean they gave the user an NSA derived kernel AND a Flipboard home page AND the memory to run both?

Oh, the horror!

Now if they hadn't given the extra RAM, then I'd complain.

Not to mention that you could just change launchers and get back the MyMagazine memory, too. Sweet.

Apple knows optimization more than anybody else, especially a company like Samsung who are famous for packing on a ridiculous amount of bloat ware (400MB of it on the Note 3 to be more specific).

Oh good grief. Everyone can and does optimize hardware and software. Apple is not alone doing that.

Moreover, for secrecy, Apple keeps most of its software and hardware people separated from each other and the chips/code. Pretty hard to optimize in such conditions.

Sure adding fancier hardware might do the trick but it's making the most out of available resources that is the way forward, not cramming in an Octacore and a laptop battery

Odd thing to say after Apple just created a 64 bit CPU

because of the 400MB of unneeded apps that are piled on top of that already tragic JIT Dalvik.

As far as app space goes, iOS apps take up an average of 4-6 times the amount of file storage as Android apps do, partly because the latter use Java byte code.

--

Ah, I'm just arguing because it's late. My real take on it all is this:

I cannot believe how much CPU and memory that modern apps take up. It's ridiculous.

I started embedded programming with 256 bytes of memory on a less than 1MHz cpu. Even in that tiny space you could write a small moon lander game. With 4K you could do 3D graphics and voice recognition, etc.

Heck, I wrote an entire UI in less than 16K, with Bezier curve support, too.

Grump, grump at today's waste of resources!

 

[ElectroBricks]

64 bit is cool, but there's a catch!

I like the 64 bit processor in the A7 chip, but keep in mind that not many apps are taking advantage of it. Currently, all of the other ios devices do not use a 64 bit processor so this results in developers less likely to optimize their software for the 5s. So while its great marketing, it won't provide anything to really show for it; for now.

 

[Max(IT)]

64-bit on ARM is a weird damn thing. It's not so much the 64-bitness in and of itself that makes it so fast, so much as it's an entirely new, much more robust instruction set that's been tied to a 64-bit architecture exclusively that gives the processor such impressive gains.

If Apple made a 64-bit processor based on the old processor model tweaked to handle 64-bit instructions, the gains wouldn't be nearly as impressive as what you're seeing now. In fact, those new instructions could, in theory, be tied to 32-bit, and you'd still see about the same gains.

No .... Those new instructions use new registries so they can't be tied to the old architecture.
Speaking about how useless is 64bits on smartphones remind me the old story about the fox and the grape ...
4 or 8 cores CPU on a smartphone are useful ?
Give me a break .... I can bet we are going to see a lot of 64 bit new Android phones from Samesung, with a brilliant 6" display next time

 

[LordVic]

No .... Those new instructions use new registries so they can't be tied to the old architecture.
Speaking about how useless is 64bits on smartphones remind me the old story about the fox and the grape ...
4 or 8 cores CPU on a smartphone are useful ?
Give me a break .... I can bet we are going to see a lot of 64 bit new Android phones from Samesung, with a brilliant 6" display next time

Thge unfortunate thing is that there is a LOT that gets added to modern smartphones that are completely useless.

my problem with the Android devices in particular is this drive for higher numbers. It reminds me of the old intel v AMD megahertz race. "we'll hit a higher MHZ even if we have to extend the instruction set making everything actually slower in the process!" oh netburst... what a disaster.

but that aside.

Adding advancement for the advancement sake is not always the best option. I Agree with Apple in some sense for that. But I also disagree with "we dont see a need for it, so you don't have a need for it" mentality they also take.

on the android side for example. The Resolution war is just downright silly. once you hit "retina" and your eyes can no longer differentiate the difference between individual pixels, what is the point of continuing to push for larger resolutions? you hit pretty darn close to "retina" at 5" in the 720p display range. 1080p blows way past the retina mark. And now they're even trying for 1440p. Why? you've past the point of being able to even see the difference. But you've added a slew of other issues to that. You need faster CPU's, GPU,s Memory bandwith. Guess what, that all comes at a significant cost of battery usage.

we are having battery issue complaints about so many devices these days because of this huge drive.

At some point upping the spec's without any real benefit is masturbatory in practice and not useful.

 

[SmileyDude]

No .... Those new instructions use new registries so they can't be tied to the old architecture.

I think you are confusing two things here -- ARM could've decided to switch to a new instruction set for 32-bit code that would've offered a lot of the same benefits of the new 64-bit instruction set. But they decided to make two changes at once and introduced the new instruction set at the same time as they jumped to 64-bit.

This is why there is so much confusion around this topic. Everyone is focusing on the 64-bit aspect and missing the new instruction set that is really responsible for the gains in performance. You can't have one without the other given how ARM has defined the architecture. But this is not some fundamental law that can't be broken -- it's just an implementation decision that ARM made.

Apple's engineers aren't idiots -- they know the tradeoffs between 32-bit code and 64-bit code probably better than any of us, even those of us who work with this stuff all the time. They certainly didn't take this transition lightly and as a pure marketing effort. Looking at the first three products that they introduced with the A7 shows that more memory wasn't their priority with moving to 64-bit. Clearly there are other reasons and the new instruction set with it's gains in performance has to be a big reason.

 

[Max(IT)]

I think you are confusing two things here -- ARM could've decided to switch to a new instruction set for 32-bit code that would've offered a lot of the same benefits of the new 64-bit instruction set. But they decided to make two changes at once and introduced the new instruction set at the same time as they jumped to 64-bit.

This is why there is so much confusion around this topic. Everyone is focusing on the 64-bit aspect and missing the new instruction set that is really responsible for the gains in performance. You can't have one without the other given how ARM has defined the architecture. But this is not some fundamental law that can't be broken -- it's just an implementation decision that ARM made.

Apple's engineers aren't idiots -- they know the tradeoffs between 32-bit code and 64-bit code probably better than any of us, even those of us who work with this stuff all the time. They certainly didn't take this transition lightly and as a pure marketing effort. Looking at the first three products that they introduced with the A7 shows that more memory wasn't their priority with moving to 64-bit. Clearly there are other reasons and the new instruction set with it's gains in performance has to be a big reason.

Actually I'm not confused at all ....
Apple with A7 supported the new ARMv8 set of instructions, and this is the real advantage here. The 64-bit support is just an extra, a first step into the future and, why not, a good marketing point.
But on what is supposed to be a tech enthusiastic forum I cannot understand why people have to complain.

 

[Truffy]

Because you do not read enough to know what you are talking about does not make your argument right. This is what Anandtech said about the A7. Notice the timing issue for 2015/2016 software and the increase in both number and size of the general purpose register and floating point registers. There are a lot of reasons why it is important to have 64 bits processor now aside from all the other improvement that come with the A7 redesign.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/3

That's all future blah blah. I read enough to know that chip architecture needs to grow before the software can expand. But here and now baby, HERE AND NOW, there's no advantage to your average joe other than bragging rights.

 

[gnasher729]

I like the 64 bit processor in the A7 chip, but keep in mind that not many apps are taking advantage of it. Currently, all of the other ios devices do not use a 64 bit processor so this results in developers less likely to optimize their software for the 5s. So while its great marketing, it won't provide anything to really show for it; for now.

You don't write software, do you? When you write iOS software, you decide which processors are supported, and the app will contain code for each processor. So all you do is check the checkbox "armv7" and the checkbox "aarm64", and the app uses 64 bit code on the iPhone 5s and 32 bit on the iPhone 5.

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That's all future blah blah. I read enough to know that chip architecture needs to grow before the software can expand. But here and now baby, HERE AND NOW, there's no advantage to your average joe other than bragging rights.

You need to learn a bit more. There are advantages _right now_.

 

[Dmunjal]

You need to learn a bit more. There are advantages _right now_.

There are advantages now, sure. But why are people saying that there is no perceptible difference between the 4 and the Air? Also, why is everyone complaining about Safari RAM issues?

It seems to me that more RAM would have been a better tradeoff to 64-bit for this generation of iPad. For most people anyway.

 

[Max(IT)]

There are advantages now, sure. But why are people saying that there is no perceptible difference between the 4 and the Air? Also, why is everyone complaining about Safari RAM issues?

It seems to me that more RAM would have been a better tradeoff to 64-bit for this generation of iPad. For most people anyway.

I like Apple to innovate, and 64 bits are innovation.
If I have to trade off it with an initial less stability, well I'm going to give Apple time.
My iPad doesn't crash every day. I use it very much and it is perfect. Yes, Safari is buggy and I'm using Mercury right now, and also this browser sometime give me a memory alarm (a very nice feature). But I'm waiting for next iOS version to fix many bugs.
And I'm sure iOS 7.1 won't be perfect too.

 

[Dmunjal]

I like Apple to innovate, and 64 bits are innovation.
If I have to trade off it with an initial less stability, well I'm going to give Apple time.
My iPad doesn't crash every day. I use it very much and it is perfect. Yes, Safari is buggy and I'm using Mercury right now, and also this browser sometime give me a memory alarm (a very nice feature). But I'm waiting for next iOS version to fix many bugs.
And I'm sure iOS 7.1 won't be perfect too.

This industry is moving so fast. To have a six month hiccup is a big deal. The iPad Air is a great device. But Iike the iPad 3, it is a generation that most should skip. Especially, if you already have a 4. Apple innovation (Retina, 64-bit) seems to take a generation to mature.

If you can afford to upgrade every year, then of course it doesn't matter.

 

[Michael Goff]

I like Apple to innovate, and 64 bits are innovation.
If I have to trade off it with an initial less stability, well I'm going to give Apple time.
My iPad doesn't crash every day. I use it very much and it is perfect. Yes, Safari is buggy and I'm using Mercury right now, and also this browser sometime give me a memory alarm (a very nice feature). But I'm waiting for next iOS version to fix many bugs.
And I'm sure iOS 7.1 won't be perfect too.

No, 64-bit SoC is not an Apple innovation. Look up ARMv8 and you'll see that it's just part of it.

Edit: It's not innovation period, it's the logical progression.

 

[xofruitcake]

That's all future blah blah. I read enough to know that chip architecture needs to grow before the software can expand. But here and now baby, HERE AND NOW, there's no advantage to your average joe other than bragging rights.

Then you have not read enough. As part of the 64 bits A7 implementation, there are more registers (and they are 64 bits instead of 32 bits as well), 64 bits data path, more powerful instruction sets. All of them contribute to the performance of the A7 processor as we know today. Some of them are not 64 bits processor unique feature but it is part of A7 that we get... If nothing else just read the performance comparison between A7 And snapdragon 800 when Apple introduced A7 back in Sept 13.. The processor war continue. Nvidia Tegra K1 is on the horizon, A8 is on it's way, and snapdragon 805 is coming. The only surprising part is that the Samsung processor is not in the mix right now.

 

[Max(IT)]

No, 64-bit SoC is not an Apple innovation. Look up ARMv8 and you'll see that it's just part of it.

Edit: It's not innovation period, it's the logical progression.

OMG , please speaks about what you know ...
ARMv8 is an instruction set, an architectural reference, not a chipset.
What Apple did was to design and implement the first commercial chipset to supports ARMv8.

Doing that one year before competitors WAS INNOVATION.

 

[s2mikey]

Interestingly, the new nVidia Tegra benchmarked faster than the A7 chip. Hmmm.....

 

[Michael Goff]

OMG , please speaks about what you know ...
ARMv8 is an instruction set, an architectural reference, not a chipset.
What Apple did was to design and implement the first commercial chipset to supports ARMv8.

Doing that one year before competitors WAS INNOVATION.

No it isn't.

There's nothing innovative about taking somebody's design and using it first. They didn't do anything except that. They took somebody's reference, the ARMv8 that they licensed, and used it in a chip. Big whoop.

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Interestingly, the new nVidia Tegra benchmarked faster than the A7 chip. Hmmm.....

I'm imagining somebody will tell you that it's either not fair somehow or it doesn't matter. One or of the other.

 

[questioner76]

I agree with others that the memory issue is irritating. Safari crashes constantly when taxed in my retina mini.

 

[SmileyDude]

No it isn't.

There's nothing innovative about taking somebody's design and using it first. They didn't do anything except that. They took somebody's reference, the ARMv8 that they licensed, and used it in a chip. Big whoop.

But they didn't take somebody's reference design in this case (or for the CPU core in the A6). They designed their own implementation of ARMv8 and shipped it before anybody else did. Nobody even knew that Apple was coming out with a 64-bit ARMv8 implementation anytime soon and now they are in millions of devices. And there still isn't anyone else shipping even a reference design implementation as of January 2014.

If you don't see that as a big deal, then I really don't know what to say.

 

[Michael Goff]

But they didn't take somebody's reference design in this case (or for the CPU core in the A6). They designed their own implementation of ARMv8 and shipped it before anybody else did. Nobody even knew that Apple was coming out with a 64-bit ARMv8 implementation anytime soon and now they are in millions of devices. And there still isn't anyone else shipping even a reference design implementation as of January 2014.

If you don't see that as a big deal, then I really don't know what to say.

Oh, so they implemented somebody else's work in a new way?

Brilliance be upon Apple. They're amazing.

 

[Max(IT)]

No it isn't.

There's nothing innovative about taking somebody's design and using it first. They didn't do anything except that. They took somebody's reference, the ARMv8 that they licensed, and used it in a chip. Big whoop.

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I'm imagining somebody will tell you that it's either not fair somehow or it doesn't matter. One or of the other.

You clearly don't know what are you speaking about ...
You don't know anything about ARM licensing and keep trying to bash apple. A very poor attempt ...

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Interestingly, the new nVidia Tegra benchmarked faster than the A7 chip. Hmmm.....

Hardly unexpected ... Newer = faster

 

[Michael Goff]

You clearly don't know what are you speaking about ...
You don't know anything about ARM licensing and keep trying to bash apple. A very poor attempt ...

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Hardly unexpected ... Newer = faster

Yes, bashing Apple. Because saying they're not the greatest and smartest is now bashing them. I have nothing against the A7, I just don't see it as INNOVATIVE. There's a huge difference between pointing out that a compliment isn't warranted and hating something.

Or not, if your focus is APPLE IS THE GREATEST.

Edit: Also, called it. But this year, when Apple has the newest and fastest chip? Benchmarks will matter again.