
Qualcomm Insider: Apple 64-Bit Chip `Hit Us in the Gut' - bane
http://blog.hubspot.com/uattr/qualcomm-apple-64-bit-chip-hit-us-in-gut
======
danielsju6
A lot of people miss how big of an advantage Apple is continually taking by
being first to market.

People try to pin their mobile success on Apple fanboys or their "magic" user
experience/ecosystem but Apple is simply just x-many months ahead of
everyone's product roadmap and continually throwing curveballs at the rest of
the players in the market. "Real world" benchmarks aside their 64-bit CPU has
everyone else distracted, rethinking their product roadmaps, and demanding it
in their devices while Apple works on it's next trick.

~~~
w1ntermute
There is no "magic" that having more computing power on a phone can enable.
The vast majority of consumers are more than happy with the speed of their
phone. The most impactful ways that Apple could significantly improve the
iPhone right now would be to (a) double or triple the battery life, (b) make
the screen unbreakable, and (c) make the screen bigger. These are the most
common complaints I hear from iPhone users. Everything else really isn't that
important. And I don't see any progress in any of those areas.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
a - I agree, I would pay for thicker/heavier iphone with 2x battery life.
However this will fracture Apple's product lineup, thus economically
unfeasible.

b - screen on iphone 5S is already very strong.

c - After lots of thinking I agree with Apple. Current form factor is just
right for communication device [1]. If you need bigger screen, chances are you
do not want a phone - you want a tablet.

[1] Iphone user here, take this with a grain of salt. Over 3 models of iphone
I never had a case. Phone is small enough for a proper grip with one hand
while using thumb to control it.

Anecdotal experience: I know 12 people with phones that have large screens. 7
of them had screens cracked due to dropping the phone. Every single one has a
case (People who dropped their phones got a case after). What is the point of
getting super light and thin phone just to put bulky case on it?

~~~
epsylon
> If you need bigger screen, chances are you do not want a phone - you want a
> tablet.

This kind of remarks is really annoying because it suggests that you know
better than us (the people who want larger screens) when you really don't.
Either that, or you are incredibly blind to the difference between a freaking
tablet (7", designed for browsing on WiFi) and a telephone with a decently
sized screen (4.7 ~4.8" compared to the 4" of the iPhone - this makes a HUGE
difference).

~~~
jballanc
I doubt this is a case of hubris, but rather of the Pareto principle. For 80%
of all users, the iPhone is either the right size or they want a tablet. What
you (and others making similar comments in reply) fail to account for is that
this still leaves 20% of users who actually _do_ want a bigger screen on their
phone.

Yes, 20% of all users is still _a lot_ of users, but it's not the 80% that
Apple has traditionally targeted.

------
ffk
"But now Apple can also claim an advantage in raw horsepower. The new 64-bit
A7 chip is the smartphone equivalent of a big V12 engine."

Except these performance gains most likely would of been seen on a 32 bit
version of the chip.

It's interesting to see how much marketing is put around 32 vs 64 bit chips
and the effect it has on how people market. The biggest benefit is the ability
to access more than 4GB of memory. For reference, the iPhone 5S has 1GB of
memory. Eliminating the need for PAE and other expensive workarounds is
definitely a bug plus. i64 and cheap doubles are certainly a bonus too.

I suspect the primary reason for moving to 64 bit is not for performance gains
now, but for future compatibility. Eventually, the iPhone 5S will be the
oldest supported iPhone and running a 64 bit processor will reduce maintenance
costs of needing to maintain a 32 and 64 bit line of software.

I think this would be a much more informative article if the author had
interviewed a few experts to discuss the benefits of 64 bits over 32 bits
rather than just say they go faster which at this point is debatable.

~~~
beagle3
> The biggest benefit is the ability to access more than 4GB of memory. For
> reference, the iPhone 5S has 1GB of memory.

No. The biggest benefit as having an addressable virtual address space which
is in the tera/peta/exa byte range. Which makes a lot of things simple and
efficient, even if you don't have a lot of physical memory. Read about e.g.
LMDB's design or Varnish's design for good examples.

The other significant benefit is more registers.

~~~
ffk
I'm familiar with this, which is the reason I mentioned "PAE and other
expensive workarounds" which allows you to break the 4GB limit.

It was badly worded on my part, I was in a hurry. :)

------
gonzo
I can't really say it better than Mike Ash, so:

<quote>

Conclusion 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.

The ARM architecture changed a bunch of other things in its transition to
64-bit. An increased number of registers and a revised, streamlined
instruction set make for a nice performance gain over 32-bit ARM.

Apple took advantage of the transition to make some changes of their own. The
biggest change is an inline retain count, which eliminates the need to perform
a costly hash table lookup for retain and release operations in the common
case. Since those operations are so common in most Objective-C code, this is a
big win. Per-object resource cleanup flags make object deallocation quite a
bit faster in certain cases. All in all, the cost of creating and destroying
an object is roughly cut in half. Tagged pointers also make for a nice
performance win as well as reduced memory use.

</quote>

[https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-
qa-2013-09-27-arm64-an...](https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-
qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html)

Android's Java runtime is going to need a lot of work to make it pull off a
runtime feat like tagged pointers.

~~~
lucian1900
Some JVMs already use tagged pointers for various things, often called
"compressed pointers". It is of unclear utility for a language like Java and
it could be easily added to ART if deemed useful.

------
nilsbunger
Anandtech had a good overview page of what 64-bit (and more generally, Armv8)
does for performance:

[http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-
iphone-5s-review/4](http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/4)

Basically, the new arch increased registers, increased register widths, and
cleaned up some architectural warts in Arm that hurt performance.

The "4GB memory" issue is a red herring -- 64-bit is about making all the
paths through the chip wider to process more per cycle.

~~~
drill_sarge
It reminds me of AMD Athlon64 period. Everyone claimed 64bit to be responsible
for everything. In fact the majority of the performance came from the
improvements over the k7 architecture (like integrated memory controller,
hyper transport, better prediction, improved pipelines, cache etc.), new
instruction sets and so on.

------
WalterSear
Except that 64 bits is still nothing but a marketing gimmick as far as the
memory sizes in smart phones is concerned.

All those companies are panicking, not because they are being left behind
technologically, but they are being left behind in the buzzword war.

~~~
colanderman
_64 bits … memory sizes_

Processor word width has absolutely nothing to do with memory size. e.g. 8-bit
processors regularly interface with 16-bit-wide memory buses, and 64-bit
processors often allow use of 32-bit-wide pointers.

What the word width _does_ affect is how much data can be processed by each
instruction. Certain algorithms benefit immensely from this (you can easily
double throughput), but the code needs to be written to take advantage of this
(or at least, not to squander the advantage), and needs to be compiled to use
64-bit-wide registers.

~~~
pmelendez
> "Processor word width has absolutely nothing to do with memory size."

Huh? How would you address high positions on your 8Gb memory with a 32 bits
pointer that will overflow after 4Gb?

~~~
colanderman
If your processor _doesn 't_ have special pointer registers, you can use
banked memory. (e.g. the high bits are selected on a page-by-page basis by the
OS, which understands 64-bit-wide pointers.)

If the processor _does_ have special pointer registers (e.g. 6502, 6809, 8086,
AVR, etc.), you use those.

------
leejoramo
How close is Google to supporting 64-bit in Android?

For Apple the story is much more than the 64-bit A7 chip, but iOS 7 and Xcode
all being released with highly polished support for the A7.

------
salient
Prediction: Qualcomm wasn't actually ready to release an ARMv8 chip even at
the end of 2014. They may try to do it _now_ , but I don't think they were
planning for it. From recent news it seems they were more interested in
jumping on the "8-core" bandwagon (you'd think they learned their lesson when
they rushed out their first quad core chip, the S4 Pro, in order to catch-up
to everyone else and also have a "quad core chip", but no, they didn't).

So how do I figure this? Because their first 64-bit chip they've just
announced a few days ago (Snapdragon 410) is an ARM one! That blew my mind.
Why? Because Qualcomm licenses ARM's architecture in order to build its own
cores, and that _should_ mean that they are coming out with a next-gen core
_faster_ than ARM's "stock cores". And yet their very first 64-bit chip is
based on ARM's stock cores?

That made it pretty obvious that Qualcomm was not prepared at all to make an
ARMv8 chip, and I think it was mainly laziness, because of the nice position
they enjoy in the Android market right now. They thought they could squeeze 3
years out of the 32-bit Krait, when normally it should've been two.

Well the joke is on them. I certainly won't buy any phone in 2014 that isn't
64-bit, since I usually change my phones every 2-3 years, and I don't want to
buy one of the _very last_ 32-bit phones.

I was actually expecting Qualcomm to release its own custom-made ARMv8 core
_early 2014_ \- and on 20nm! So I can't believe Qualcomm was actually going to
rest on its laurels to such degree that they weren't even planning to switch
to 64-bit, and probably 20nm either, even in 2014! That's insane, and only a
company that thinks it has too much monopoly power in a market would do that.

As Andy Grove used to say - stay paranoid about your competition. A paranoid
company would've expected at least to _some degree_ Apple to release its first
64-bit chip this year. But they didn't even have to do that. They just had to
follow the _original_ plan. The one that says release a new core every 24
months, and on a new process node (the one ARM is also following). What ever
happened to that plan?

------
DigitalSea
While 64 bit mobile processors are certainly a significant step forward for
mobile computing, at present 64 bit processors for mobile are a gimmick
because it's going to be a long time before the capabilities of such a chip
can be taken advantage of. All this means is that we'll be seeing phones hit
the market that have 16gb plus of RAM and well, I think we are a long way off
seeing phones with that much memory hit the market. We are only seeing phones
with 3gb of RAM that require equally as large batteries to power them like the
Samsung phones.

It took years for the PC market to transition from 32 to 64, and it'll take
years for mobile to do the same. The amount of time it will take means
competitors shouldn't worry because by the time 64 bit processors make sense,
everyone will be manufacturing one. Sure memory addressing is just part of the
picture and a 64 bit processor means data bandwidth is double that of a 32 bit
chip which can be seen below 4gb of RAM, I think at present the iPhone isn't
taking advantage of such improvements.

~~~
jjtheblunt
The processor, in 32bit mode, offers more on-core registers, and a beefier
instruction set.

Programs compiled by a compiler aware of those distictions should
significantly, measurably, perceptibly outperform those compiled for the older
more constrained architectures.

------
socialist_coder
If only Apple would give us bigger screens! I love iOS but the bigger screens
of the top Android phones really have me wanting.

~~~
jlarocco
Please no. Some of the Android phones are so large they just look ridiculous.
If a person wants a tablet, they should buy a tablet.

~~~
epsylon
There's a huge difference between a tablet and a screen size larger than the
iPhone's.

------
gnator
I think Apple pulled a good one on Android and other mobile OSes. With
Android's ecosystem being so fragmented and Windows is still trying to get a
foot hold on the apps market, a push to 64bit will further fragment their
ecosystem.

~~~
w1ntermute
> With Android's ecosystem being so fragmented

Except that's just FUD: [http://www.phonearena.com/news/New-Android-and-iOS-
fragmenta...](http://www.phonearena.com/news/New-Android-and-iOS-
fragmentation-charts-are-just-as-flawed-as-the-term_id50332)

~~~
acdha
[http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html](http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html)
shows it's not, although it's definitely improving. The best way for that to
continue is not to pretend the problem doesn't exist but rather to keep
reminding carriers and vendors that this is one of the reasons they're less
successful than they hope.

------
ramsaysnuuhh
Can anyone explain to me why being 64 bit matters on a phone?

~~~
michaelt
Often when a CPU becomes "64 bit" it's not just the memory bus that's
expanded, but all the CPU registers become wider, and often more are added.
For example A32 had 14 32-bit registers, whereas A64 has 31 64-bit registers.
This can speed up a variety of calculations.

For example adding 64-bit numbers; finding the end of zero-terminated strings;
certain hashing and encryption operations; and so on.

It's also good marketing, of course.

~~~
colanderman
Yes, the importance of _more_ (and to some extent _larger_ ) registers can't
be understated. If you're not paying close attention, register spills (i.e.
when the compiler doesn't have enough registers so decides to stick stuff on
the stack) can easily turn decently performing code into poorly performing
code if the register spill happens in a tight loop.

14 registers is pretty tight. 31 registers are better, and doubling the width
helps for structure locals and parameters (which Clang/LLVM fortunately does a
good job of keeping in registers). (I do a lot of work on a processor 60-odd
64-bit registers, and even then GCC decides to spill registers now and then.)

------
squozzer
My fear is that touting a certain number of bits in the instruction set as a
proxy for technological leadership will bite Apple in the ass. It's never been
something they emphasized with much success -- e.g. the early PowerPC chips
were arguably superior to their x86 contemporaries but it wasn't enough to
compel users to switch.

And whether Apple wants to buy into the chip game, well, good luck with that.

------
7952
Companies like Apple and Google have significant power to direct the
investment efforts of their competitors. Adopting something just to catch up
with Apple is a marketing gimmick. Using that money to add more RAM or improve
the integration of the software is not a gimmick and could give an edge. Just
like how Microsoft got distracted by Bing whilst Google built an OS.

------
noobiemcfoob
anyone who argues that 64-bit at the mobile level is worth anything other than
being a marketing gimmick is an idiot. We've had 64-bit at the desktop level
for years and the large majority of desktop programs have yet to find a way to
take true advantage of it.

All 64-bit does at the mobile level is introduce a ton of power loss for no
real performance gain. The power usage Apple is reporting is likely due to
other technological improvements that more than compensate for 64-bit's loss.

The first poster had it right. All this does is screw up the rest of the
industry, make them scramble, while Apple can buy time to figure out what to
do next.

Side note, Qualcomm's layoffs have little to do with their processor line...

------
data-cat
This makes me wonder when 128 bit processing will come around.

~~~
codeflo
We already have 128-bit registers for vector computations (for example, the
SSE registers in x86).

As for addressing 128 bits of memory: that's more than a century off even if
memory continues to double every two years (which doesn't seem likely to begin
with). It's actually plausible that the step to 64-bit addressing was the last
one, ever.

~~~
dragontamer
64-bit ARM means passing around 64-bit pointers by default.

In most code settings, this pollutes the cache (you can only hold half as many
pointers), and leads to slightly weaker performance.

64-bit computing is NOT an advantage in the phone world. It is a massive
advantage for database applications or large web services... but certainly not
for phone apps in the near future.

~~~
codeflo
I know what 64-bit computing is. And I didn't say anything about phone chips,
or ARM. It seems like you're posting this rant to every subthread, regardless
of content?

------
sifarat
Ah! remind of the times, he fucked up himself. Now the baby (fakestevejobs) is
on the right track. _chuckles to himself selfishly_

------
jjdro
Apple needs to capitalize on this by abandoning their current lameass
numbering scheme and releasing the iPhone64 next year.

------
adamnemecek
> A 64-bit processor handles data in bigger chunks than 32-bit processors, so
> it can get jobs done faster.

If it is faster, it's not because it 'handles data in bigger chunks'.

~~~
coldtea
Well, partly it is because of that.

~~~
adamnemecek
Explain please. Are you talking about the fact that if you are doing
calculations on 64-bit operands that it might take you fewer cycles?

~~~
colanderman
Yes; this is true of any vector operations in algorithms that are not
constrained by memory bandwidth.

------
guttermaw
Tim Cook should do the next keynote in an invisible nano-robe.

The whole industry will be naked in a week.

~~~
wmf
To be fair, iOS is getting performance improvements from ARMv8. That leaves me
with the question of whether such improvements apply to non-ObjC code and if
so why the rest of the industry didn't realize that.

~~~
danielsju6
Objective-C has some really interested 64-bit tricks, here's a great blog post
on the changes and how they affect things [https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-
qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-yo...](https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-
qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html)

------
goggles99
Android has basically been a three legged horse in the speed/performance
because of the Dalvic runtime anyway. Who cares about 32/64 bits. When Android
comes out with it's new java compilation model and runtime (ART) in version 5
and claims that your phone OS and apps can now execute twice as fast, where
does that leave Apple in the performance race?

All of this does not really matter anyway. iPhone has always had better
performance than almost every android phone. This has not saved them from
losing massive market share. The PC/Mac history is repeating with Android/IOS.

~~~
MaysonL
_The PC /Mac history is repeating with Android/IOS._

Exactly: Apple dominates the high end, and is at 0% of the low (some might say
junk) end.

~~~
goggles99
>* Apple dominates the high end, and is at 0% of the low (some might say junk)
end.*

Where did you get the idea that Apple dominates at the high end? They haven't
for a while now.

The Galaxy S4 was outselling the iPhone 5 all by itself for several months
(before the 5s came out). The collective of high end Androids have taken over
the high end market on a seemingly permanent basis. Apple is at less than 50%
and is on a steady decline vs the (high end) Android collective of phones.

------
wnevets
"says the Qualcomm employee."

sounds legit to me.

------
Nursie
It it hit them in the gut it's because they wanted to supply the chips, and
had a good thing going. 64 bit? Meh.

