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

[dav465]

I am not that technical, but I am sure that a 64 chip is better because the IOS is optimised for 64bit. Maybe apple have found a way to improve results for devices with less than 4gb RAM or maybe it is just a marketing ploy so the consumer knows there is a difference.

For the phone makers,Qualcomm and Samsung to say it's a total gimmick then turn round to say oh by the way our next chip will also be 64bit.
Is that not just a slightly hypocritical?

 

[\-V-/]

Infinity Blade III.

That is not just a tiny example of the performance boost from the A7, it's quite a ridiculous difference.

 

[john123]

That's silly. You can't get those advantages without moving to the 64-bit architecture. They are an advantage of moving to 64-bit.

It's not silly at all. First, there are ways to accomplish both of those things. 64-bit makes some of them easier and more feasible engineering wise. Second, continually arguing that "ZOMG 64-BIT IS FASTER" is the reason why people get confused and don't understand where the performance differences come into play and why. It's intellectual disingenuous at best.

 

[Millah]

... aaaaaand once again we have armies of people that know nothing about what it really means to have 64bit architecture thinking they know what it means (it's really only for >4GB RAM!) trying to agree with other people that also don't fully understand all the implications.

There are a few of us that write software, and have for many, many years, that deal with 32bit vs 64bit hardware at a deep enough level that can't do much more than cradle our heads in our hands when this sort of dialogue barfs forth on the forums, blogs, or idiotic declarations like this tool from Qualcomm (who, really, should know better but is taking advantage of the public's understandable lack of true knowledge in this area).

There are many types of applications that will see an improvement running on a 64bit platform as opposed to 32bit. There are many that won't. All of us run a mix of those apps that will and will not benefit from having a 64bit CPU and a 64bit bus underneath them. Some of the apps that benefit will see minor improvements, some will see huge improvements. Blanket declarations like '>4GB of RAM is the only real reason to use 64bit' are borne out of the birth of 64bit penetration in the consumer PC market where sales people at Best Buy and Fry's pointed out, when asked by potential customers "why should I get a 64 bit system", responded with the RAM answer. It's a correct answer. It's just nowhere near a complete answer.. it's simply the easiest one to explain and the easiest one for a layman to understand. That's grown into this fallacious concept that the only real reason need it is for RAM access beyond the 4GB mark.

Thank you, you've brought some sanity and rational thought to the conversation.

 

[adam044]

You mad bro that the iPhone with half the specs of your brand new note 3 smokes it? Ya you are.

 

[john123]

You need to look further back into Apple's history to relate and quote a relevant analogy . This is not a revival of the MHz Myth, it is more inline with how some of the 68k, and early PowerPC systems had architecture limits, compared to their advertised specifications.

I need to further back than 2001? I don't think so. Also, I think you perhaps misunderstand the reason for the analogy. It has little to do with what is and isn't true about architectural limitations and more to do with Apple's penchant for misleading marketing collateral. Sure, every company does it to some extent, but Apple has been notoriously bad about it when it comes to the performance shell game. If anything, however, the fact that it isn't Apple claiming that 64-bit inherently leads to better performance, but instead is other people glossing over the details and making that (false) claim, is at least somewhat comforting.

 

[nickgri]

1 Gb Dram

Funny they should say "only" 1Gb Dram! I remember running a whole Mac in the old days on like 8 megs of ram. I had a whole working version of word on a floppy disc. Why today they can not seem to make things streamlined like that is awful. We do not need gigabytes for a way to write a letter-as pretty as they might want. If we had over 20-40 megs of ram we were styling! Come on really -is it so hard to make things astoundingly fast with this much horsepower and say "well that only kicks in with over 4 gigs"? We went to the moon on far less.
Someone lost track somewhere of how to code or something.

 

[Elbon]

The grapes are sour, said the fox

I'll let Ylvis know.

 

[tongxinshe]

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.

There are other benefits than allowing 4GB of memory addressing. For one thing, the instruction can be much simplified when doing 32-bit multiply/addition/minus operation, without extra overflow protection concerns. For another, a lot of apps already need 64-bit "long long" variables in many places, a 64-bit chip can do these operations much more efficiently.

Sure it's not anything of one-night-break-through-from-stone-age-to-rocket-science, but it's not just marketing gimmick or hype.

 

[kas23]

I can imagine how this would have went if it'd come to a competitor first.

"ZOMG Apple's still using 32-bit chips. Who wants to buy old tech? Lolz1"

D.

I'll tell you exactly how it would have gone. People on here would would be all up in arms about how it is a gimmick and 64-bit is not needed on a mobile phone.

 

[leman]

No, FFS, scroll up. Read the specifics in what Anand says, page 4. For the billionth time, 64-bit in and of and by itself doesn't make any difference.

Nobody is talking about 64-bit in and of by itself!! A7 is a CPU with many performance-increasing architectural improvements, and it also happens to be 64-bit. Would it be possible to make a 32 CPU with these improvements? Yes of course (which would imply creating a new instruction set for it)! Because the architecture would have changed anyway, adding 64-bit as a way of thinking about the future is an obvious move. And besides, as pointed out by number of people above, 64-bit pointers allow using of tagging techniques which can improve performance of dynamically dispatched language like objective-C.

 

[gburnham]

The basic foundation of 64bit benefit is two fold -- memory addressability and integer length. When used correctly, a longer integer length can speed up complex processes significantly. That benefit can be seen today if the application requires complex operations on large amounts of data.

The rest of the optimizations are obviously in ISA and chip architecture. Those help immediately as well.

And eventually, when we have >4gb of memory to work with, that benefit will come too.

So in most current programming approaches where the "sledgehammer" solution of using tons of memory is okay, we won't see any improvement. But well written apps with complex operations will see significant gains.

This is the fundamental reason that iOS 7 runs better in 64bit than 32bit on the exact same hardware. We're seeing some (but not all) the benefit already, as long as the programmer develops for it. And Apple has developed for it.

 

[Stella]

No real story here, competitors do this all the time. Trash the competition.

 

[Northgrove]

Chandrasekher goes on to say that Qualcomm is developing a 64-bit chip for use in mobile applications, but that the chip will be more beneficial from engineering efficiency and chip design standpoints, rather than as a consumer-driven feature.

loool.

Well maybe that is part why Apple also did this? How can Qualcomm be so sure that everything that exists in the A7 chip is for "consumer-driven features"? I'm personally pretty sure this is not primarily for performance gains or "consumer features", but rather to align iOS app development much better with Mac app development. Now the devs can assume the same things about data types and much more, where the platform matters less. Easier porting of apps and app frameworks.

The real problem here... Is that Apple got their 64-bit mobile chip out on a wide scale while Qualcomm was still working on theirs, so they couldn't hit the market with a bang when it was released. Sour grapes.

 

[ftaok]

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.

OK, could Apple have gotten these performance gains just by changing the pipeline and architecture on a 32-bit chip? Or did the chip have to be 64-bit to benefit from these changes?

Serious question as I'm not a Computer Engineer.

 

[mrjr101]

Memory availability is the biggest positive, but like the article said, with 1gb of ram, it doesn't come in to play.

While it will be useful in the future, the 5S would function identically to the user if it were 32bit.

not true! current 64 bit applications such as DeeJay2 and Infinity Blade III have shown significant performance improvements over 32 bit versions. And the list would be growing exponentially in the upcoming months. The "gimmick" narrative is nothing but a publicity stunt

 

[tbone0726]

Ok, if it's such a marketing gimmick, why is Samesung following suit?

 

[dcinema]

Should Not Insult Client's Flagship Product

Bad move to publicly insult major client's new flagship product. Plus he's wrong - the 64 bit isn't a really big deal but the A7 chip is giving big performance boosts.

I would say this shows pretty bad judgement from a Marketing officer.

 

[gatearray]

Except that I am pretty sure the note 3 already had 3gb of ram and the note 4 will likely have 4gb making 64bit cpus useful around this time next year

Actually, if you're going with the whole "64 bit is only useful to address more than 4gb of RAM" argument, then nope, it won't be useful this time next year unless these new systems have 5gb of RAM, that's what "more than" means.

 

[JCox]

The chip itself is not a gimmick, the "64-bit" marketing hype is, and people here are drooling for more...



Name one way the iPhone 5S experience is improved by being 64-bit instead of 32.

DJay and VJay seem to think that it would be impossible to do before what they do NOW with the 64bit.

 

[Popinbottles]

hmm?

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.

Maybe that's why Apple called it the most "forward thinking Iphone"

 

[subsonix]

"Marketing officer", well that explains it.

 

[KPOM]

OK, could Apple have gotten these performance gains just by changing the pipeline and architecture on a 32-bit chip? Or did the chip have to be 64-bit to benefit from these changes?

Serious question as I'm not a Computer Engineer.

According to Ars Technica and AnandTech, they could have gotten most of the performance gains simply by changing to the 32-bit version of the ARM v8 architecture. However, they'd eventually have switched to 64-bit to improve the memory access. Apple decided to just take the double-leap. It's forward thinking, for sure, even if the performance improvements are minimal right now.

 

[chrmjenkins]

Glad you quoted Anand, because he's smart and that's an excellent place to start. Go back and re-read page 4 of the iPhone 5S review. You'll find that all the performance gains discussed are attributed to new instructions and the larger register space. Those things, again, are items that came with the move to 64-bit but are not inherently "about" 64-bit.

All I'm talking about is what the 64-bit move, in and of itself, does. In other words, take out the new instructions and larger register space, and evaluate 64-bit versus 32-bit architecture ceteris paribus. Would the 64-bit beat the 32-bit? Nope, they're going to be about the same.

Maybe we're just having a semantics debate about what's inherent and not inherent to 64-bit architecture. I hope that's the case.

To me, the point of removing the enhancements of the ISA to argue only about 64-bit is the semantics argument. Arguing about 64-bit by itself is a completely empty argument because the features of the ARMv8 ISA contextualizes it. Apple wasn't moving to some generic 64 bit architecture. It was known as ARM all along. To try and talk about 64 bit without the ISA is utterly pointless. To argue that they shouldn't have advertised it as 64-bit is empty and dumb. They never pretended the gains were only because of 64 bit. They claimed a multiplicative speedup just as they've always done with their performance talks.

 

[macdaddykane]

The core "Gimmick"

This shows core reason why most of the other guys can't sell phones and don't understand why Apple does.

They think that "gimmicks" are what sells devices. They are constantly trying to come up with or copy the next new "gimmick". These same people believe that innovation is the culmination of gimmicks. Thus, while they tout their spec sheets and features, they and their pundits accuse Apple not being innovative and iPhone buyers are simply iSheep, fanboys, or slaves to fashion.

Here's a tip to Qualcomm marketing department: the majority of iPhone 5s buyers (and the majority other smartphone buyers for that matter) have no idea what kind of chip they have, don't watch keynote speeches, have never seen any benchmarks, don't read tech blogs. So ask yourself honesty without making excuses, why do iPhones sell so well? Because every iPhone owner knows and its not about the gimmicks....