“By far the most the most important new thing that was announced at [Apple’s media] event [this week] was that the iPhone 5S uses a 64-bit ARM chip of Apple’s own design, the A7,” Jason Perlow writes for ZDNet.
“While it is surprising for many to see a 64-bit System on a Chip (SoC) on a smartphone so soon, I can certainly understand why Apple wanted to get one out into the wild,” Perlow writes. “The phrases ‘Forward-Thinking’ and ‘Desktop Class’ were thrown around during the launch event when discussing the iPhone 5S and the A7 processor. That stuff isn’t just marketing hype in place here, it’s a glimpse at the thought processes that are going on within Apple as it pertains to their long-term device and operating system strategy.”
“The reason why Apple wanted to get a 64-bit ARM chip into the wild is largely an issue of platform convergence,” Perlow writes. “I expect that our smartphones will become the center of our computing experience and even extend themselves to tablets and the desktop, through a unified operating system that runs identically on all three form factors and is supplanted by back-end Cloud services which will do the heavy lifting for our line-of-business applications and data… At some point, iOS will end up on some kind of laptop or tablet convertible device using a 64-bit ARM chip of Apple’s design. I think that will happen sometime around 2015, when the future 64-bit SoCs are powerful enough to actually assume the type of creative content desktop workloads Macs are actually used for today…”
Read more in the full article here.
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