“When Apple unveiled the iPhone 5s on Tuesday, the company touted as one of its tentpole features the 64-bit desktop-class processing power of its new custom-made A7 chip. ‘The A7 is up to twice as fast as the previous-generation system at CPU tasks,’ Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said. ‘This is the first-ever 64-bit processor in a phone of any kind. I don’t think the other guys are even talking about it yet,'” John Paczkowski reports for AllThingsD. “According to Schiller, the A7 is ‘up to twice as fast’ in raw processing power and graphics performance than its predecessor, the A6. And when paired with Apple’s forthcoming iOS 7 operating system — which has been designed with native 64-bit kernel, libraries and drivers — it provides unparalleled performance. ‘The benefits are huge,’ Schiller said. ‘This is a huge leap forward.'”
“64 bit integer math will allow the A7 to execute operations much faster than the 32-bit A6. ‘The fact that the A7 has twice as many processor registers means that more operations can occur without the processor using main memory, which is slower to access,’ Carl Howe, VP of research and data sciences at the Yankee Group told AllThingsD,” Paczkowski reports. “‘This means for that, for some codes, the A7 will be twice as fast (or faster, depending on how many memory accesses the original code had) to run code, because the processor doesn’t have to use main memory as much.’ This should also improve battery life, as well.”
Paczkowski reports, “‘Because Apple makes the development environment and has updated those tools for 64-bit architectures, a developer only really needs to recompile their application to make it 64-bit compatible — assuming they haven’t done anything non-standard with their code,’ said Howe. ‘This will not be true with Android, by the way. The Android Java app and native app environment will need support from Oracle, who owns the Java environment as well as 64-bit support from the Android kernel. Android has a lot more moving pieces to coordinate, and will take longer to go to 64-bit.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple is killing Android bit by bit.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MotivDev” for the heads up.]
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