“Apple’s shift to 64-bit mobile devices in iOS 7 came as a surprise, but the company’s information outlined for developers indicates that the shift to 64-bit mobile apps will bring significant benefits in the short term, something Google’s Android appears challenged to replicate even in the long term,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
“The benefits of moving iOS apps to 64-bit include the hardware advantages of the A7’s 64-bit cores (including more registers, and likely more cache), the improvements and optimizations inherent in the new 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set, and the requisite API enhancements that come along with iOS 7,” Dilger reports. “Whether Google’s Android will ever make a transition to 64-bit is also difficult to pin down… Android apps are not Linux processes; they are Dalvik executables that run on a Java-like virtual machine. Typical Android ‘.dex’ apps are not native code in the way all iOS Cocoa Touch apps are. Instead, they are more akin to Adobe Flash middleware or JavaScript code running within a native browser’s JavaScript engine (which is essentially what Google’s ChromeOS is, too). Redesigning Android’s Dalvik/Java VM architecture to make effective use of a 64-bit processor is not a trivial undertaking.”
Dilger reports, “Delivering such a technically involved transition to 64-bit would also come as Google itself is turning its attention to Chrome, rather than doubling down on Andy Rubin’s Android-centric strategy, which so far has primarily amassed significant legal problems related to its cavalier approach to intellectual property and built the company a fan base of users who don’t like to pay for things, and in particular, software… These realities might force Samsung to virtualize 32-bit Android on top of its promised 64-bit chip for spec’s sake, resulting in a truly ‘hoax 64-bit’ done for benchmarking theatrics rather than real performance gains…”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]