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Qualcomm Employee: 64-Bit A7 Chip 'Hit Us In The Gut'
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Wow touched a nerve huh? It's ok..... If you feel you need to have 20 tabs open maybe an iPad is not the best option for what you're doing. Work smarter not harder.
not just for the number of registers
The 64 bit ISA brings several new instructions that greatly improve some floating point applications
What about the million other apps? And the fact that the "OS and all first party apps" will now use more RAM but we get the same measly 1GB??
This is just the tip of the preverbal iceberg. Apple has these fools on the run. Like always.
I won't be surprised if Ballmer does his own "just one more thing" before hauling a** and releases a virtual-64 bit Nokia N-gage.
I won't be surprised if Ballmer does his own "just one more thing" before hauling a** and releases a virtual-64 bit Nokia N-gage.
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".
Lovely little bit of condescension.
Of course, you happen to be wrong. Yes, 64-bit processes can indeed boost performance, though obviously never anywhere near to the 100% the uninitiated might expect, as most operations a CPU will deal with, even in a 64-bit environment, will be between 8 and 32 bits.
It's been pretty firmly established that much of the time, unless care is taken, there is little to no performance improvement-- and in fact, in many cases, slight performance decreases can be seen.
And as mentioned, things require more memory.
I imagine this was half marketing gimmick, half getting the transition to 64-bit over with on Apple's part.
When the G5 came out with 64-bit computing, it was kind of a big deal; again, part marketing, part breaking the 4 GB RAM barrier, which was important. (Also important for the Opteron, a server processor.)
Intel didn't catch up with their x86 (well.. obviously..) for quite a while, but it was okay.
When are people going to get that moving to 64-bit improves performance regardless of how much developers rewrite their apps?
Maybe try reading H&P, no not Hewlett & Packard...
I feel like at least half the people in this thread do not know what 64bit actually is, safari crashes have nothing to do with the archtecture of the A7 chip, it has to do with a rushed version of IOS7 for the iPad, it is software not the hardware that makes apps crash..
So do you guys think that it software, not hardware related? I've also had the App store crash a few times. I've also downloaded Chrome and I honestly find it no better than Safari as far as crashing and reloading.
And thanks for the replies. Reading the iPad forum and the Apple forum it seems like this is a common complaint.
You are a very poor systems engineer then or a poster child of why systems engineers should stay out of software concepts. ArmV8 has little to do with a mythical 4GB issue and everything to do with performance per watt.
I am a software engineer and I approve this message.
The Note 3 is the first and only production phone to have 3GB of RAM. It wouldn't be surprised if the Note 4 has 4GB of ram with a 64bit processor. I don't see a lot of developers really pushing for 64bit apps because why bother when Apple still uses small amounts of memory on a platform that's already quick and still has tons of 32bit hardware roaming the market. Sadly when I had the iPhone 5s there were still apps that haven't been updated for the 4" display. I could only imagine 3 possible resolutions when the next iPhone comes out. It will take at minimum 2 years for 64bit to become mandatory on iOS.
I don't think that was the point - 64-bit code takes up more memory than 32-bit code. Pointers are 2x the size, instructions are bigger, structures are padded to larger sizes. Of the three devices with an A7, the only one with arguably enough RAM is the iPhone 5S, since it has a screen with roughly 1/4 the pixels. The 5 already had way more than enough RAM with 1GB, so the impact of the 64-bit code isn't as bad on the 5S.
Certainly Apple doesn't need more than 4GB for any devices yet, but it is rather surprising that neither of the new iPads got 2GB this time - especially the Air, since it has the space for the extra RAM with its external DRAM (as opposed to the stacked DRAM on the rMini and 5S).
I'm hoping that some of the memory usage can be addressed in iOS updates, but I suspect the next iPads will all be at 2GB and this year's iPads will be looked at like the 1st gen iPad with its way too little RAM.
Isn't this the model that Intel/Microsoft used successfully to kill the vertically integrated models of Apple (desktop) and Sun (server) in the 80s and 90s?
What ever it is it should not be happening. You got to figure that the hardware and software is tied so close together that it would be pretty rare to see such crashes coming from first party software. So many people want to ignore the fact that either the software or hardware is buggy. Maybe those people are not power uses but it got to the point that Safari was crashing everyday along with Chrome. I regret the decision for even getting the iPhone 5s because now I have dislike for iO7 in general.
Best thing about the 5s was touchID.
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Yup. I'll take 64bit Code and a nice fat CPU/GPU Cache any time.
Name some apps that truly take advantage of it? What's that one app that makes you think, "WOW this app just flies with 64bit code and a fat GPU Cache". Those paper specs do not match real world experience.
64-bit processing on a phone is like 11 on an amplifier volume. No practical difference, all a numbers game.
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How so? What benefits?
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How so? What benefits?
I've heard that iOS 7.1 addresses a lot of the crashing. I think iOS 7 was rushed.
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The ARM v8 architecture is a lot more efficient than the older ARM v7. Even recompiled 32-bit apps are faster on it.
Anyway, it's also good that Apple got everyone started since it means we'll see more powerful apps more quickly. Remember there's a lag between when hardware comes out and software is written to take advantage of it.
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Frax and Djay are Two.
Agreed - too many changes were in motion at once: Mavericks, iOS 7 and 64-bit migration on iOS. I suspect that they got 64-bit iOS to a good enough point, released and now are making it great. As long as they didn't screw up on the fundamentals with 64-bit ARM, they should be able to polish 7.1 enough to make up for having to push it out the door when they did.
True, but it isn't as if the rest of the market was rushing to release 32-bit ARM v8. To use a desktop analogy it's as the entire market stuck with Core 2 while one designer leapt forward to Haswell.
Yes, it's a software issue, nothing more than that for now.
Any apps with WebView (Safari's rendering engine API) will be crashing, not just Safari and that includes Chrome.
I had Feedly, Twitterrific and etc crashing each time I try to open the in-app browser there.
The integration with software/hardware != bug-free software. Nothing in the universe can be immune to bugs. Even CPU arch that's been around for decades still have bugs that companies intentionally work around. It is impossible to ever create anything without bugs.
Apple dropped the ball by rushing iOS 7 out, should've let it bake for a few more months as iOS 7.1 is looking good already.
I find it pretty amazing that someone would so willingly overlook a huge advancement like this. It's been outlined a number of times what the benefits are. Are there drawbacks too? Sure, but rarely does this industry move forward without any hiccups along the way. In another generation or two, iOS users will be happily benefiting from having a 64-but CPU while the competition goes through all the same issues migrating to 64-bit, but without the experience Apple has had in doing migrations like this.
Is this like the people a few years back saying there were zero benefits to a retina display? Or dual processors in a phone? I'll gladly take a few hiccups in exchange for big improvements in the overall system.
Just step back for a moment - you can now get an iPad mini with similar specs and computational power as what was in the MacBook Air a few years back. That's pretty damn impressive and has some real benefits. If we have iPads that are similar to today's MBAs in just three years, you'll be happy that Apple bit the 64-bit bullet now rather than later.
Apple is still just as much vertically integrated on desktop computers as they are on phones and tablets. It's kinda their thing... Apple controls almost everything in their products end-to-end.
To review:
- Company A designs the hardware and the software. (Apple)
- Company B buys the processor from Company C and gets the OS from Company D. (other companies)
There's nothing wrong with the second method... sometimes that's all a company can do.
But Apple is firmly planted in the first method.
It really doesn't matter. Even if Apple wait another year to release A7, the OS would just be as buggy then. It takes a long time to get the software right on a new hardware.
Apple's not going to double the efforts of designing two separate CPUs when they can just focus on the latest CPU technologies they can release within a year and then start to optimize the OS for it.
The same thing happened with the Retina MBPs, it took them a year to release Mavericks that was optimized for it, which turned out great on my first-gen rMBP. ML was just bad on it.
I'd bet iOS 8 will be a screamer on A7.