Anand Chandrasekher, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Qualcomm, in a recent interview, has definitely panned the new A7 SoC Apple, claiming that the introduction of 64-bit is a mere publicity stunt that, in this specific historical moment, adds nothing use the experience of users and does not guarantee any performance improvement. Many, especially if fans of Apple, may hastily conclude that it is normal words of a competitor, which could never recognize the excellent work done by a competitor, but the answer to the question “from a point of view purely technical sense that they have at this time CPU and 64-bit OS on smartphones and tablets? ” is not as obvious as it might appear.
The theoretical performance advantages of 64-bit are known to all and definitely not Chandrasekher to ignore them, so much so that in the same interview he said that the solution itself has some advantages, especially for developers, that sooner or later will ask en masse to chipmaker architectures of this type. The problem that arises Chandrasekher is therefore more complex and, together, more limited in time: what they do now.
Before you can really exploit such architectures in fact serve a wide range of premises that currently seem to be missing. ARM for example, will introduce its 64-bit solutions, the Cortex A57 , only the next year, as you probably will also Samsung, but a 64 bit without the support of an operating system is useless and so far Google, developer of the most widely used operating system UltraMobile, he never talked about an Android version in more than 32 bits. What, therefore, could never serve in 2014 64-bit processor with a 32 bit OS is not really clear, especially because even the amount of RAM in ARM tablet, let alone in smartphones is still well below the 4-GB limit above which is impossible to address memory for a 32-bit system. But it so happens that we are stuck with 3 GB and, moreover, only in some tablets and phablet top range.
So, without a 64-bit OS and more than 4 GB of RAM to address what it is for a processor with this architecture? It might be objected at this point that Apple a 64-bit OS actually have it already, iOS7, but even so the benefits are not immediately obvious, because beyond the amount of RAM there is also another problem to be solved : convince developers to write, or rewrite, the app in the same way, so that take advantage of all the other premises. Only at this point the performance advantages to users would be more evident. So introduce a 64-bit time is not useless by itself, one has to start somewhere to change that and the same thing happened years ago also in the desktop, as argued also part of the press more loyal to ‘Cupertino company.
The problem, however, is different and as often happens when you have to deal with Apple, it is purely communicative trumpeting that its SoC is the first 64-bit as if it were an objective advantage on competition is actually a false news, a move marketing, as he called Chandresekher, which in practice will not make any real strength, let alone performance, users, at least for a few years yet, since that is when the whole context is not mature. In all this, then obviously the competition between chipmaker has nothing to do much.
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