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Qualcomm Employee: 64-Bit A7 Chip 'Hit Us In The Gut'
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5. Apple and competitors end up in court due to petty patent and other technology squabbles.
No what? It's a software issue, not a hardware issue. 64-bit apps aren't the same as 32-bit apps. 64-bit Safari is very unstable and is crashing because of memory leaks, which was mostly been resolved in iOS 7.1 beta 2 as confirmed by several beta testers.
Depending on which application you're talking about. At the moment, very few apps outside of Apple's stock apps are compiled for 64-bit operations. A 64-bit app without using 64-bit data variables are not likely to eat up more than 32-bit app.
If we're just talking about Safari, 64-bit Safari is just leaking memory badly in iOS 7.0.x . It's been mostly resolved in 7.1 beta 2.
When are people going to get that no matter how optimized and improved a 64bit software is, it eats up more RAM than the 32bit counterpart, so it is very essential to add more RAM if you're going with 64 bit hardware and OS.
And no I'm not asking an iPad with 8GB of RAM. But 1GB certainly meagre.
No, moving to 64 bit directly impacts performance significantly, even when memory is the same, by decreasing register pressure.
Oh OK. I didn't understand what you meant when you said it was iOS 7s fault. I haven't been keeping up with the 7.1 betas.
Agreed 100%. There is a difference between wider SIMD (remember AltiVec
anybody?) and wider CPU. Apple would have had better performance adding some 64 bit extensions to the A7 with fewer drawbacks and still been able to say "64 bit".ARM has been doing a great job of catching up to Intel. At 20% the power draw of Intel's 15W "U" line, these have about 40% the performance.
If Apple continues like that I'd like to see a dual-CPU capable A8 in the next Macbook Air. Those puppies would scream and be cool enough to leave on your lap.
I disagree that 64bit is stupud, but RAM amount is a real problem. It is especially visible with tabs - the experience is pathetic. Also I hate that most apps "forget" their last state so fast, when you open several other apps and quickly return to it - you have to start over. This is not proper multitasking.
Exactly, so maybe person who was talking about a browser (stock app) would have been hit by the roughly 30% higher RAM requirement. :|
Perhaps the concern comes from the fact that typical 64-bit apps consume more memory than 32-bit counterpart (typically due to the fact that pointers occupy twice the memory). Not everything in memory are pointers, of course (in most cases, much of it consists of strings), but the general rule of thumb is that you need more RAM when running 64-bit apps in 64-bit OS.
The 64 bit chip is all about 4 years from now when they cut off the 32 bit code shunt. This is how apple thinks in large cycles and that is not how every company builds there products. This will be the first legacy 64 bit device to make it into the strictly 64 bit world in the coming years. This is so they can have one single code base 64bit all around. I think it was a smart move if you can do it why not do it going 64 bit on the chip if it cost you nothing. I think that most people will look back on this and go what foresight they had.
Are you sure that is an iPad Air you are using? Mine keeps 6 going quite nicely at the same time sans any problems. Daily use since early November without trouble.
So PREDICTABLE.
It's already been established that there are more benefits to a 64-bit architecture than an increase in RAM capacity.
No, I don't care to elaborate. You can search ANY thread that mentions "64-bit".
Had to log in to vote you up, so I might as well respond: Yes, there is a huge number of speed improvements that benefit your apps running in 64 bit mode. Apple spent a few years adding optimisations to 64 bit apps in MacOS X, and all these optimisations apply now to 64 bit iOS apps.
"...But once Apple introduced a 64-bit processor, all the other phone-makers wanted one too. "Apple kicked everybody in the balls with this. Its being downplayed, but it set off panic in the industry."
LOVE. IT.
LOVE. IT.
What do you think is causing the tab reloading on the iPad Air? Is it iOS 7 or lack of RAM? I see a low memory log almost every day in diagnostics. Honest question.
Oh well. The _big_ memory eaters are graphics, audio and video data, and there are no pointers involved at all. And there are plenty of cases in Objective-C and C++ where 64 bit apps use _less_ memory.
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I wish mine would do that. I get at least one Safari crash a day and a low memory log. Tabs reload with 2-3 tabs open depending on the web site. 5-6 tabs open is almost guaranteed to show low memory.
I think you're just seeing the ios 7 effect. I have an iPad 4, and since the upgrade it crashes to the black screen with white Apple logo several times a week. I can barely remember a crash at all in ios 6.
"Low memory" conditions are part of normal operation of iOS. It's intentional. iOS keeps background apps in RAM for as long as possible and throws them out when it needs their memory.
Only for applications that are are being bottlenecked by 32-bit architecture, which are rare.
The best way to explain it is that jumping from 32 to 64-bit doesn't offer any performance gains in and of itself, but it's less likely to get bogged down, because it can handle larger amounts of data being thrown at it more gracefully. Like if you have a game that's been compiled for both architectures, the 64-bit version won't have double the framerate of it's 32-bit counterpart. But if you were to start throwing in complex physics models, and higher end AI, a 64-bit processor running the same amount of cores on the same CPU architecture as a 32-bit processor would be able to leverage all that information a little better, leading to slightly improved framerates.
It wouldn't be a massive, game changing, difference, but it'd be measurable. Thought that advantage could be matched by a slightly quicker 32-bit processor. Really, the best places to see the real advantages in 64-bit architecture would be in movie editing with large files, 3D rendering, and the like. Anything that has to do with tons of raw data being tossed around and worked on. Things you're not currently doing on iOS, in other words.
Do you think a 64-bit email app will allow you to type out words faster? Will it send your messages any quicker? What about 64-bit Angry Birds? Will it allow for...what...more birds onscreen? Will it suddenly be better because you can stuff twice the amount of data into a 64-bit register? Hell, these apps aren't even coming close to saturating a 32-bit chip. 64-bit won't do anything.
And by keeping 6 tabs opened are you sure it won't reload the content once you tap any of older tabs?
I could open 10, 12 or 15 tabs on my iPad Air if that's your point. But it won't hold any web content in it for more than few seconds. Everytime I go back to previous tabs, it reloads. Bad experience.
My old pentium 4 PC with 2GB DDR2 on 32bit Windows XP could keep 25 tabs opened any time without any reload, like at all.
and I was ridiculed for stating the obvious. That the 64bit processor was the most important thing about the 5S, not the gold and white version.
What do you think is causing the tab reloading? Could it be iOS 7?
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I still have an old Windows XP box with a P4 2.8GHz, 2GB of RAM and I can keep at least a dozen tabs open with no reloading.
"The 64-bit Apple chip hit us in the gut," says the Qualcomm employee. "Not just us, but everyone, really. We were slack-jawed, and stunned, and unprepared. It's not that big a performance difference right now, since most current software won't benefit. But in Spinal Tap terms it's like, 32 more, and now everyone wants it."
It's not so much that apps run better on 64-bit, as it is (currently) a marketing advantage.