Qualcomm Marketing Executive Calls Apple's 64-Bit A7 Chip a 'Marketing Gimmick'

[TheHateMachine]

Reading through these furious and feverish replies... I can literally hear the smacking as all the kool-aid laced spittle spatters across their monitors.

You guys are too much. Keep on sipping and don't forget to turn up your giga bolts for a faster computer. Marketing.

 

[devinci99]

I do not believe it is a gimmick. I think it is a very smart move from Apple and could fit any plans for future convergence between Apple desktop/laptops with Mobile.

By using their popular iOS devices to push A7 (64bit ARM), they would get a lot more developers to port their apps and get on the bandwagon much faster than Intel/AMD did.

With enough support for their ARM based 64bit platform, it makes it easier to get Arm-based Laptops out to market with apps ready for it (or at least developers already familiar with it)... With the rumors about Apple considering ARM-based laptops/desktops this move makes a lot of sense and could play an important role.

At the rate tablet markets are growing, we could easily push through the 4GB RAM threshold in another year or two, and Apple would be ready by then; while other plays who have not made the same preparation for 64bit would be caught trying to scramble to catch up; and trying to get all their developers caught up would take another couple years.


This is a VERY smart move.

 

[conradwt]

Don't get it twisted.
The A7 64 bit architecture is currently faster due to changes in the pipeline and overall architecture. Currently there are no 64 bit apps, so you cannot demonstrate any improvement due to 64 bit.

So yes, it is marketing hype.
You don't need 64 bit integers in a mobile application. When you start moving large data sets around and you need memory pointers larger than 32 bits, it matters.

64 bit in desktop architectures mattered because you needed more than 4 GB of memory. Unless you use a windowing scheme, which is real inefficient (look at 286 and 386 processors) you can't access a bunch of memory.

So currently it's hype. In a year maybe not.

I respect your opinion but you don't have any numbers to back up your claim which is similar to Qualcomm. You say that there aren't any 64bit apps but here's a few:

Infinity Blade III
Djay
Vjay

Also, I'm sure that there are many more in the App Store now as well as forthcoming applications. Next, it has been several articles posted here as well as others sites where developers have provided information about the boost application performance using 64bit ARMv8. Furthermore, I'm sure that many other graphics and cpu intensive application will benefit from the 64bit over 32bit CPU. Thus, you'll see more 64bit apps in the areas of games, video, music, and image processing as well as others o benefit from this new CPU. Finally, all applications will not benefit from being 64bit. However, this also gives Apple an opportunity create better synergy between the desktop and mobile where one can start to envision mobile as the desktop of the future. Adobe could very well be putting a full blown version of Photoshop onto a mobile device in the near future.

 

[Renzatic]

I do not believe it is a gimmick. I think it is a very smart move from Apple and could fit any plans for future convergence between Apple desktop/laptops with Mobile.

By using their popular iOS devices to push A7 (64bit ARM), they would get a lot more developers to port their apps and get on the bandwagon much faster than Intel/AMD did.

With enough support for their ARM based 64bit platform, it makes it easier to get Arm-based Laptops out to market with apps ready for it (or at least developers already familiar with it)... With the rumors about Apple considering ARM-based laptops/desktops this move makes a lot of sense and could play an important role.

At the rate tablet markets are growing, we could easily push through the 4GB RAM threshold in another year or two, and Apple would be ready by then; while other plays who have not made the same preparation for 64bit would be caught trying to scramble to catch up; and trying to get all their developers caught up would take another couple years.

This. Here's the real reason why Apple is making the jump to 64-bit. It has absolutely nothing to do with performance gains now, and everything to do with what ARM could be tomorrow.

----------

Infinity Blade III

...and how does 64-bit make Infinity Blade III run better exactly?

Vjay

Still the greatest name for an app ever.

 

[john123]

To me it sounds like you are arguing that Apple was justified in waiting for LTE chipsets to become more power efficient and for LTE to more widely penetrate the carriers markets before marketing a phone with it. Surely, an argument of "at some point in the future, it [LTE] will make sense" would not be held against Apple.

For some reason, though, I fail to believe that your same criticism (or that of others, being raised) would be advanced against Samsung or Google where either of them the one who, last month, were the first to market with a 64-bit processor in their phone. Instead I'd be inclined to believe I'd hear something along the lines of, "See, Samsung leads the market again! Apple is once again lagging behind the curve. Why don't they step up to the plate for once."

Are you sure you replied to the correct poster? I neither criticized the move to 64-bit, nor attacked Apple for anything other than the same not-entirely-honest marketing that most companies use. And, per my posts, I've been using Apple products for over 20 years. So neither of your paragraphs appear to address anything I said...

----------

Well, its rather simple. The critics of A7 here (including yourself btw.) for some reason get stuck at the notion '64-bit', without going any further. While the other look at the A7 as the whole, i.e. the improvements it brings beyond 'just being 64-bit'.

Um, say what? Where did I criticize the A7? Quite the contrary; I mentioned several times the performance improvements and where they came from, as was cited in Anand's (thorough as always) review.

I didn't get "stuck" on 64-bit. I simply dealt with the singular claim at issue in the Qualcomm exec's comments—whether the term "64-bit" in and of itself inherently implies performance, or whether the term really is all about the marketing.

Good grief. Do people even read before hitting the reply button? It seems not...

 

[vsighi]

I just tuned in and to be honest next time we all going to see an iPhone with 4Gb of RAM it may possible happen in 2020 when we start to colonize planet Mars

 

[Nevaborn]

So 64bit is a gimmick but theyre releasing one .....

Yea, guy needs to shut up and go away

 

[john123]

So 64bit is a gimmick but theyre releasing one .....

Yea, guy needs to shut up and go away

Perhaps you need to re-read his comments. If it's not clear upon a 2nd read, consider a 3rd. And then a 4th. And then a 5th.

 

[justinnum1]

That's why samsung is feverishly working to get 64bit on their next phones, right?

 

[sk1wbw]

Wasn't he just talking about mobile phones and tablets, most - if not all - of which don't need more than 4GB of RAM? I believe you misread the article.

And Bill Gates said nobody needs a large hard drive and lots of memory. Remember that?

 

[bwillwall]

And what do they think quad core mobile processing is? Is there any proof that it's really helping the performance that much?

 

[freediverdude]

Apple is prepping for future devices with more memory, as well as performance increases on current devices. It's part of a long term roadmap, so no, it's not a marketing gimmick in the same way that waving your hand in front of the phone to answer a call, or eye tracking, or any of the Samsung bloatware apps are.

 

[Cadallin]

- This ignores the fact that a large address space is not the only benefit of 64-bit. A wide range of operations benefit.

- There is a real, near-term, practical benefit to a large address space - now the OS can use virtual memory. iOS currently (or at least 32-bit iOS, haven't looked at details for 64-bit) does not. All of the address space of all apps has to fit in 4GB. The article characterizes it as an issue only when apps get larger than 4GB.

With 64-bit and virtual memory, now the OS can memory-map files, as it does on desktop OSs.

There's another real advantage for security (although whether iOS does this yet is unknown).

It's possible on modern processors to map sections of memory to other sections of memory. With modern OSes on 32-bit processors, this doesn't mean much. But with 64-bit, you can use this to randomise the locations of things in memory. Why would you do this? So a virus or other malware can't reliably know, or guess where important security data or bits of the OS are! Its makes sandboxing and security MUCH more effective. (OS X on Macs DOES already do this).

 

[MaSx]

Anything Apple throws at us is no gimmick!

 

[SlCKB0Y]

So he says the 64-bit is a marketing gimmick, and then admits they're also working on a 64-bit mobile chipset.

Marketing doublespeak at its finest.

Because the Android phones his chipset are designed for will get 4GB RAM within the next year. iPhone still has 1GB.

 

[Applesexual2]

That's why samsung is feverishly working to get 64bit on their next phones, right?

Samsung's phones use 3 GB of memory. Next year's lineup will have 4 GB of RAM, so it's natural that Samsung uses 64-bit processors then.

----------

Apple is prepping for future devices with more memory, as well as performance increases on current devices. It's part of a long term roadmap, so no, it's not a marketing gimmick in the same way that waving your hand in front of the phone to answer a call, or eye tracking, or any of the Samsung bloatware apps are.

I think it's more about being the first one to have a 64-bit processor so when Samsung releases a 64-bit processor next year, Apple can just claim that Samsung is copying them. Quite clever marketing trick, if you ask me.

 

[DJJAZZYJET]

Leaving aside the fact that the A7 actually is much faster—you have to look at the bigger picture, as Apple often does.

This guy mentions ram as a reason for 64-bit. While that is true, what would you have Apple do? They're fast approaching 1 million apps on the app store. By providing a 64-bit chip today, developers will have plenty of time to ready their apps for a couple years down the line when mobile devices begin breaking the 4GB threshold. Apple will have a rock-solid foundation of 64-bit apps and years of hardware ready to go and Android will have nothing because manufacturers waited until there was "real benefit" to put such a chip in their machine. This should also enable Apple to drop 32-bit support from iOS before Android, which I presume would provide some benefit? By 2016 or 2017 the iPhone 5 and below probably won't get iOS 10...err I mean iOS X.

The other thing is the iPad. It will probably get more ram before the iPhone line, so it will need 64-bit sooner rather than later. And with rumors about a larger, "iPad Pro" type machine, we could end up with 4GB earlier than we expect!

Lastly is the prospect of A series chips in future Macs. Considering how much code OS X and iOS share, and considering Apple's penchant for low-power consumption and high performance, is it really that crazy? Apple successfully navigated the switch from Power PC to Intel, and while it's kind of a pain, I think it's within the realm of possibility that they could do the same with ARM. Consider this: the iPhone 5S benchmarks around 2550 on Geekbench, and the iPad was usually 10-22% faster over the past two generations than the iPhone. So it's possible the new iPad could bench close to 3000! Now consider the top-end MacBook Pro Retina benches around 13000, and it would only take four A7X chips to get within that range, right? Up their clock speeds and you could surpass that.

THIS! Couldn't have said it better!

 

[SlCKB0Y]

It's strange how Operating Systems, CPU hungry software or multi-media plug-ins such as audio and imaging effects perform so much better in 64 bit regardless of address space. It must just be a gimmick and everyone's imagining things

So how much media transcoding and compression tasks are you doing on your iPhone?

Wow, this whole thread is a pretty hard core display of a collective failure to grasp even basic computer science principles. What's even worse is that you all feel the need to come here and publicly display this ignorance like it was something to be proud of.

Given all the tasks that are off loaded to the GPU these days, the single major factor in adoption of 64bit CPU by a long way is addressable memory. Android Phones will hit the 4GB limit very soon, Apple will not for a number of years if they continue at the current rate of RAM increases.

Besides all this, when Android goes 64bit, the only applications which will need to be ported are those using the NDK. Apps which exclusively use Java (Dalvik) will just run without change as soon as Dalvik is ported. On iOS, each of those million apps needs to be updated - a major benefit of Android.

This same hardware abstraction that means most Android apps will "just work" once Dalvik is ported to 64bit is the same reason why they tend to have higher resource requirements - a characteristic that Apple fans have been harping on about for years but it would now seem as if the shoe is on the other foot now no?

 

[Applesexual2]

Leaving aside the fact that the A7 actually is much faster—you have to look at the bigger picture, as Apple often does.

This guy mentions ram as a reason for 64-bit. While that is true, what would you have Apple do? They're fast approaching 1 million apps on the app store. By providing a 64-bit chip today, developers will have plenty of time to ready their apps for a couple years down the line when mobile devices begin breaking the 4GB threshold. Apple will have a rock-solid foundation of 64-bit apps and years of hardware ready to go and Android will have nothing because manufacturers waited until there was "real benefit" to put such a chip in their machine. This should also enable Apple to drop 32-bit support from iOS before Android, which I presume would provide some benefit? By 2016 or 2017 the iPhone 5 and below probably won't get iOS 10...err I mean iOS X.

The other thing is the iPad. It will probably get more ram before the iPhone line, so it will need 64-bit sooner rather than later. And with rumors about a larger, "iPad Pro" type machine, we could end up with 4GB earlier than we expect!

Lastly is the prospect of A series chips in future Macs. Considering how much code OS X and iOS share, and considering Apple's penchant for low-power consumption and high performance, is it really that crazy? Apple successfully navigated the switch from Power PC to Intel, and while it's kind of a pain, I think it's within the realm of possibility that they could do the same with ARM. Consider this: the iPhone 5S benchmarks around 2550 on Geekbench, and the iPad was usually 10-22% faster over the past two generations than the iPhone. So it's possible the new iPad could bench close to 3000! Now consider the top-end MacBook Pro Retina benches around 13000, and it would only take four A7X chips to get within that range, right? Up their clock speeds and you could surpass that.

I know the numbers probably don't transfer as literally as I've laid it out, but it's probably a fairly close guess? Any CPU engineers care to chime in?

I'd love to get a quad-core A7X iPad Pro with 4GB of ram, 12" screen and some real pro-level graphics editing and web design apps. Perhaps it would bench close to a MacBook Air? Haha, someday I hope that I can remove the desk and iMac from my office and just have a bean-bag chair and a big-ass iPad. Make it happen, Apple!

Performance improvements came from moving from 32 nm to 28 nm Samsung HK+MG process. Don't give Apple credit where it's not due.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Apple will have a rock-solid foundation of 64-bit apps and years of hardware ready to go and Android will have nothing because manufacturers waited until there was "real benefit" to put such a chip in their machine. This should also enable Apple to drop 32-bit support from iOS before Android, which I presume would provide some benefit? By 2016 or 2017 the iPhone 5 and below probably won't get iOS 10...err I mean iOS X.

See my post above. *sigh*.

You really don'y understand how these things work do you?

 

[hexor]

This. Here's the real reason why Apple is making the jump to 64-bit. It has absolutely nothing to do with performance gains now, and everything to do with what ARM could be tomorrow.
----------

...and how does 64-bit make Infinity Blade III run better exactly?

Still the greatest name for an app ever.

I see we need to repeat this blog post reference on every page of this thread to show it does improve performances noticeably.
http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html

 

[groovyd]

64-bits is better

Is everyone here forgetting that 64-bit allows the processor to transfer data twice as fast as 32-bit in bus operations such as DMA? Also, it allows loads and stores of 2 x 32-bit pieces of data or instructions at the same time. Max memory addressability is perhaps the least important difference between 32 and 64-bit processors.

For example for all 32-bit instructions the processor actually receives two instructions at a time allowing it to fill it's instruction caches twice as fast. During memory copy/move operations it is able to copy/move 2 x 32-bit words of data per clock instead of 1. A good percent of program execution actually involves memory copies and moves, especially image/audio processing and codecs.

Another example is say a program task is to go through memory adding 2 32-bit integers in an array. This allows the load of both integers in a single cycle instead of two.

 

[captain kaos]

Someones throwing his toys out of the pram.

 

[mdelvecchio]

Reading through these furious and feverish replies... I can literally hear the smacking as all the kool-aid laced spittle spatters across their monitors.

You guys are too much. Keep on sipping and don't forget to turn up your giga bolts for a faster computer. Marketing.

computer science:

http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html

Adding it all together, it’s a pretty big win. My casual benchmarking indicates that basic object creation and destruction takes about 380ns on a 5S running in 32-bit mode, while it’s only about 200ns when running in 64-bit mode. If any instance of the class has ever had a weak reference and an associated object set, the 32-bit time rises to about 480ns, while the 64-bit time remains around 200ns for any instances that were not themselves the target.

In short, the improvements to Apple’s runtime make it so that object allocation in 64-bit mode costs only 40-50% of what it does in 32-bit mode. If your app creates and destroys a lot of objects, that’s a big deal.

...he knows more than you. sorry.

----------

...and how does 64-bit make Infinity Blade III run better exactly?

it's faster, which allows them to spend more on adding things. watch their keynote. read some of the excellent computer science essays by people who know what theyre talking about (hint: who arent marketing directors working for the competition). theyll tell you exactly why.

http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html

----------

Because the Android phones his chipset are designed for will get 4GB RAM within the next year. iPhone still has 1GB.

but as you should know by now, addressing memory over 4GB is only one part of 64-bit, and does not define 64-bit.

just read the article from this very topic already:

http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html

 

[Renzatic]

I see we need to repeat this blog post reference on every page of this thread to show it does improve performances noticeably.
http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html

The "64-bit" A7 is not just a marketing gimmic, but neither is it an amazing breakthrough that enables a new class of applications. The truth, as happens often, lies in between.

The simple fact of moving to 64-bit does little. It makes for slightly faster computations in some cases, somewhat higher memory usage for most programs, and makes certain programming techniques more viable. Overall, it's not hugely significant.

Thanks for giving me a nice, detailed blog post that explains in detail exactly what I've been saying all this time.