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Qualcomm Employee: 64-Bit A7 Chip 'Hit Us In The Gut'
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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".
As I stated before, the A7 is a powerhouse and a great improvement over A6.
Mind you, I own both an iPhone 5s and a 5.
My 5s is just as fast as my 5 at loading apps or UI fluidity.
It's a mobile phone so 64-bit is not a big thing yet on this portable devices.
64-bit for phones will be great in a couple of years, when the iPhone 6s will have 2GB of ram and all of the apps in AS will be updated so that the CPU will be use at it's real potential.
It's a big thing but it's not fully ready for mobile phones.
Ya but it has nothing to do with it being 64bit. It's the processor itself that has those added features. Not because it's 64bit.
iOS developers need time for migrating their apps to 64bit, that could be a main reason for early introduction of 64bit chip. Most of Android apps don't need to be recompiled as they are not in native code, but in VM instructions - so only Android itself has to be migrated to 64 bit and chipmakers for Android devices didn't have the pressure to create 64bit chips.
1Gb of RAM also makes perfect sense. With 2Gb users could use iPad Air for year or two more then 1Gb version - and Apple will need to sell future generations of iPads too
If it's anything like the desktop browsers, it'll eat up a ton regardless of the bittage. But it shouldn't make so much of a difference that you're only able to keep two tabs open in 64-bit vs. 5 or 6 in 32 before it starts reloading websites.
...shouldn't being the key word here. Without being able to see how much ram Safari eats up, it's all guesswork on my part.
Pretty pathetic if you actually believe this. Anand and others have clearly shown that the 64 bit ARM instruction set carries huge and very immediate advantages. There's also the benefit of additional registers. An A7 with the previous 32 bit instruction set would be noticeably slower.
You hit it right on the head. Amazing after decades of history with companies going under for slacking on their long term R&D, the latest generation of MBAs still can't do a proper prognosis following a schedule to Moore's Law.
As far as 64-bit performance, it is already making a difference in apps with a lot of visualization graphics for real-time performance. The database crunchers of the world are the caboose on this wagon train.
You think it was a punch in the gut for Qualcomm? How about the Android Kernel team at Google? I'm sure they have been spinning feces all over the Mountain View campus for the past two months working on strategies for a 64-bit release of Android that is more than placing on the "-x64" compiler and linker switches of the master make file.
1Gb of RAM also makes perfect sense. With 2Gb users could use iPad Air for year or two more then 1Gb version - and Apple will need to sell future generations of iPads too
Apple can gouge us all they want, god bless 'em. Lil' Tim's gotta eat too, you know.
Wrong, these enhancements ONLY apply to the 64-bit instruction set which only runs when apps are compiled for 64-bit. ( the entire OS will be which is a major portion of the energy drain ).
The chip just packs both a 32 and 64 bit instruction set in just like any desktop chip.
It's not just for phones anymore. The iPads use A7 too.
Those apps using real time AV processing are already benefiting.
The other apps that use A7 specific features (e.g., M7, special security-oriented instructions) are also benefiting.
So much misinformation here yet again the 64-bit ARM instruction set is massively optimised for low power. The 32-bit instruction set was released in 1995 and has seen no significant upgrades to power reduction since ( most since then were due to fabrication changes not the instruction set ).
Any apps compiled for the new 64-bit instruction set will immediately use 10-15% less power than if it was compiled and running under the 32-bit instruction set. This is measurable by Apple's developer tools and the iPad Air is proof of it due to a smaller battery, higher performance yet better battery life.
The only reason the retina mini got the 64-bit chip was likely to save power.
This might be the fly in the ointment of my argument. If ARM streamlined and updated the baseline instruction set for 64-bit, then that might possibly make for a big amount of differences in performance, larger than what we saw jumping from 32-bit to 64-bit on x86 processors. It's hard to say without knowing more, though.
This is exactly what ARM did. Remember the ARM 32-bit instruction set is nearly 20 years old (1995). The 64-bit instruction set was announced in 2011 and released in 2012. It's the first majorly used CPU instruction set in decades designed from the ground up to be low power without trading performance.
The kicker is it will not benefit old apps still compiled against the 32-bit instruction set at all.
2GB will also use up battery faster. Apple will pace memory size with battery and processor performance.
The A7 has significant improvements way beyond the capability of addressing more than 4GB of RAM.
This is one of Apple's strengths: Vertical Integration
Apple wants a 64-bit processor because they want to move to a 64-bit OS... so they design their own. They don't have to wait for anyone else. And it's all part of their carefully crafted roadmap... a single vision.
vs
A manufacturer ordering a processor from a 2nd company... to run an OS written by a 3rd company. None of whom share the same vision or roadmap.
Qualcomm will gladly sell a 64-bit processor to any manufacturer who wants it... but that won't make a lot of sense until Google makes a 64-bit OS, right? All these companies are waiting on each other to complete the puzzle.
Apple wants a 64-bit processor because they want to move to a 64-bit OS... so they design their own. They don't have to wait for anyone else. And it's all part of their carefully crafted roadmap... a single vision.
vs
A manufacturer ordering a processor from a 2nd company... to run an OS written by a 3rd company. None of whom share the same vision or roadmap.
Qualcomm will gladly sell a 64-bit processor to any manufacturer who wants it... but that won't make a lot of sense until Google makes a 64-bit OS, right? All these companies are waiting on each other to complete the puzzle.
You already do right now. All of the operating system + stock apps are compiled 64-bit and using the new instruction set to greatly decrease it's power consumption. The only difference is rather than leave the extra battery life Apple did other things like slim down the iPad, put in a retina display in the mini and also make unleash a much more hungry GPU.
while I'm sure you're right about the mini with the A7, I'm pretty sure another reason they gave it the A7 is because it would have otherwise needed an A6X to run the screen which would kill the battery.
That kinda puts all kinds of things in a weird position for me, because 32-bit against 64-bit in and of itself is unimportant. It's not the bitness of the processor that's important, it's the new instruction set. And since the new instruction set is directly tied to the 64-bit architecture, then yeah, 64-bit ARM will be better than 32-bit ARM by default. So even if an app doesn't directly need those extra bits to do its thing from an x86 perspective, it's better to compile against it anyway because of the added advantages that come alongside it.
So really, none of my old arguments count here. It's an entirely different situation.
I have to LoL at those that keep talking about tabs on their iPads.... How many do you honestly need? I can have 5 open (from kids being on the iPad) and I don't see an issue.
I understand some want to be able to have 100 tabs open all running complex number crunching apps but this is real life, not star trek.
I understand some want to be able to have 100 tabs open all running complex number crunching apps but this is real life, not star trek.
Yea the bitness has little to do with it, though there are subtle improvements due to the extra bits in 64-bit pointers for the objective-c runtime that add up.
The instruction set is what everyone should be drooling over because it alone is what is enabling a good 10-15% power savings across the board without changing a single line of code ( assuming your code cross compiles without changes ).
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Again mostly for battery life though, the A6X would have been fine as it powered the full size iPad fine. The Mini always had a bit of power savings since the backlight is a bit smaller and doesn't need quite as much drain.
I'm sure they tried it in both configurations.
WELL GOOD FOR YOU :slow clap:! Your use case doesn't necessarily match their use case, and neither you nor they are any more right or wrong than anyone else.
I rarely ever have a ton of tabs open at any given moment. Usually I max out around 3 or 4 at most. But there have been situations where I've been researching something, and had upwards of 20 open at once, both for reference to previously read entries, and for interesting pages I hadn't read yet. Doing this kind of stuff can occasionally be a little trying on an iPad.
Yes, and even with the added features, running 64-bit apps isn't always better. Especially when it uses up all your free RAM!