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Qualcomm Employee: 64-Bit A7 Chip 'Hit Us In The Gut'
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Apparently you took the word of an unnamed "Qualcomm employee" as gospel. Alrighty then.
Tune in next week when 16-year-old Lin Chen, line cook at Foxconn's employee cafeteria, describes the physics that went into designing the iPhone 5S.
Michael
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I second that. Those at Qualcomm who needed to know this probably did. But they would not disseminate this information to entire company.
In general, I think this 64-bit thing got too much attention from the press. It's just a natural progression. There are pros and cons in switching to 64-bit architecture this year rather than the next year.
In more interesting news, Digitimes just revealed that Samsung will be manufacturing Apple Ax processors at 14nm FinFET node.
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This makes me wonder what you're doing? I've had my 5s since launch and it's crashed once. And i use it heavily with multiple apps at a a time, all the way from games to spreadhseets, to DJ software and more....
i don't know why you chose my quote since it's extremely coy about the situation.
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I think the quote "The roadmap for 64-bit was nowhere close to Apples, since no one thought it was that essential ... " explains it.
Apple has a roadmap that they are executing, since they plan to use the same components for other and future devices.
Qualcomm has to satisfy their customer demands. And if their customers weren't demanding a 64-bit chip, then they wouldn't put much effort make it. So now customer want it for marketing reasons, but it may still not be on their product roadmaps.
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Apple has a roadmap that they are executing, since they plan to use the same components for other and future devices.
Qualcomm has to satisfy their customer demands. And if their customers weren't demanding a 64-bit chip, then they wouldn't put much effort make it. So now customer want it for marketing reasons, but it may still not be on their product roadmaps.
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Where is Snapdragon called that other than fanboy parties? Did you see Qualcomm's profits and profit margins last year?
64bit doesn't magically improves performance. In fact, naive move from 32bit to 64bit actually decreases performance.
The gain in performance on modern desktop CPUs comes squarely from the improved efficiency of the RAM: 32bit operations, however tightly one packs them, can't reach the peak throughput of the memory bus.
For as long as the devices wouldn't get dual/tripple/quad channel memory bus, there would be very little advantages to 64bit CPUs. (The little advantages are reserved to the number-crunching apps. But the number-crunching on portable devices is avoided as heck, since it eats into the battery life.)
P.S. Some mistakenly ascribe the performance gain to the larger 64bit registers. But that is generally false, since that gain is largely negated by the increased stack alignment and size of pointers, making memory accesses slower and lowering cache efficiency.
I beg to differ. It depends on your memory subsystems design. If you can fetch double word every cycle, there is no penalty of having 64bit register. If you have to go through two full decoding and fetch cycles to load/store the 64 bits double words, of course you are penalized. Judging from the measurement of the memory performance data that Anadetech did, it looks like A7 can fetch very close to 2 full words per cycle. The point of all this discussion is that there are lot of design effort going into the A7 design. The 64 bits addressing is just the headline and A7 as a design effort is spectacular.
The timing is important as well. It will take 3-4 years for the full transition from 32 bit application to 64 bits application. Apple just move up the schedule for the memory hog application and true multitasking apps that use a lot of memory. The software upgrade angle is as important as any reason to roll out 64 bits processor now rather than waiting for a couple years. The marketing message is also important. Last year, it looks like Apple was behind in hardware spec race and now it looks to be ahead in multiple fronts (A7, M7, touch ID). Let's see who in Android has the money and can respond in the next couple years to match the progress. M7 is also a throw away at this point with very few apps that make use of it (I use Pedometer ++ which is one of the few exception). But once more M7 specificed apps show up, all of a sudden Apple will looks like genius for release it. Now what will Galaxy S5 include? It is mighty silly to think that the message is not important.
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That's the way it's always been. Specs don't matter until the things I like have the best specs.
Am I the only one that doesn't give a rats ass about the processor? Every task I do on my phone has been easily executed and my old HTC One S has been more than capable with everything I've thrown at it.
So... more important to me is the damn battery life hogging SCREEN!
Why is there not enough of a push to improve that stone age crap so we can have more than a days worth of battery life?
So... more important to me is the damn battery life hogging SCREEN!
Why is there not enough of a push to improve that stone age crap so we can have more than a days worth of battery life?
Maybe so but some report seem to indicate the next iOS update will fix ipad air problem
This review seem to show the improvement
I was thinking the same... I wonder if these companies (smartphone makers, not Qualcomm) did any research on what people look for when they shop for a smartphone - that is, whether consumers care will about 64-bit any time soon.
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I don't think they will because the general public is, simply put, very stupid.
Apple spearheaded the non-removable battery 'feature' and now every manufacturer is doing it. Because of this, your average consumer will have no clue on how to tinker with the the device and will likely go out and buy a new phone (on a contract!). You can bet on it that the poor battery life is partially responsible for continued sales.
That said, I doubt manufacturers will do something about the screen.
Android 64 bit supported already.
http://www.slashgear.com/android-64-bit-support-already-baked-in-just-add-hardware-17298038/
Supposing you were more than excited about the announcement by Apple this past week that their next-generation Apple A7 chip and iOS 7 brought on 64-bit support for processing, it may come as a shock that Android already has such capabilities. In fact, because Android is based on Linux, its had the ability to work with 64-bit processing for a long, long time. Word straight Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin suggests that there isnt even any special development process that has to be done for Android to handle 64-bit processing power it just works.
http://www.slashgear.com/android-64-bit-support-already-baked-in-just-add-hardware-17298038/
Supposing you were more than excited about the announcement by Apple this past week that their next-generation Apple A7 chip and iOS 7 brought on 64-bit support for processing, it may come as a shock that Android already has such capabilities. In fact, because Android is based on Linux, its had the ability to work with 64-bit processing for a long, long time. Word straight Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin suggests that there isnt even any special development process that has to be done for Android to handle 64-bit processing power it just works.
Qualcomm's direct competitor isn't really Apple. If Qualcomm's customers are demanding 64-bit, they can't go to Apple and buy an A7.
They can go to Nvidia and Samsung to buy their SoC, but so far those companies don't have 64-bit either. I think the point the employee is making is that 64-bit wasn't even on the Qualcomm roadmap, while the Tegra 6 is supposedly to be 64-bit and "rumors" are that the Exynos 6 is too.
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Hmm... Safari has never crashed on my Air - I have six tabs open right now, and I often have more. Nor has any other app crashed. And has my 5s has never crashed. Maybe I got lucky.I think I'll go buy a lottery ticket.
I obviously didn't mean that literally. I regularly have 10 tabs open, several of then large PDFs. It crashes my Air but not my iPad 3.
And no, my use case is not unreasonable.
Sounds like PR BS to me. As far as the product cycle of the 5S is concerned, "zero benefit" sounds far more accurate. I know that someone needed to eventually implement 64bit to start the push in that direction, in that sense, there was a reason for it.
From what I have observed during my time here is that specs only matter when they favor Apple, otherwise they are usually dismissed as meaningless or unnecessary. Ditto for sales figures, market share etc.
Makes perfect sense we're on Apple site. Members on here love Apple products anything else really doesn't matter, they really don't care about it. Will they defend the product they love of course they will. Not sure if android or windows forums exist but I don't think you see a bunch of Apple enthusiasts on there to bash windows are android.
There is a Windows site that I go to frequently.
They're more than willing to point out things that are wrong with Microsoft.
I own an iPad and an iPhone. I love the iPad, like the iPhone alright. You could say that, yeah, I'm a fan. Yet despite my fan status, there are things I don't like about them, and I'm always happy to point out the things I'd want to see improved.
Being a fan of something doesn't mean you have to love it exclusively and unwaveringly, and bash everything else under the sun just because it's not the brand you love. You're allowed to not like everything Apple does, and you're allowed to be impressed by everyone else's products if they come out with something good and interesting.
Oh, and yeah, you see Apple members over on other sites bashing products left and right, about the same as you see Windows and Android fans here doing the same. It's all kind of pointless and petty.
There's a reason why Apple want 64 bit processors in iOS devices...
64 bit will be essential when iOS & OS X 'become one' for want of a better term. For iOS devices, iPhone 5s and late 2013 iPads will be the the minimum requirement for this new OS...