Apple’s 64-bit A7 is no gimmick: New iPhone 5s offers major performance leap

11 years ago

“When Apple announced the iPhone 5s would be powered by a new 64-bit processor, the A7, many responded with a shrug,” Serdar Yegulalp reports for InfoWorld.Conventional wisdom had it that 64-bitness in a mobile processor had no particular advantage.”

“But then the first real-world performance benchmarks came in, and soon most everyone changed their tune — including the manufacturers of chip sets for competing devices,” Yegulalp reports. “Skepticism about the value of 64-bit mobile devices could be seen when the IDG News Service’s Agam Shah talked to analysts earlier in September about the A7. Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research, dismissed the 64-bitness of the A7 as “marketing — the ability to say you’re the first to have it.” Forbes wasn’t impressed either, calling it all more of Steve Jobs’s famed “reality distortion field” at work.”

“But AnandTech decided to let the numbers speak for themselves,” Yegulalp reports. “The tech website ran its custom suite of browser benchmarks against the A7 and saw an average of a 44 percent increase in speed over the A6. The gains for the new processor were quite real, and… w

hat also helped was the way Apple complemented the presence of the processor with a fully 64-bit version of iOS and 64-bit applications to go with it — in short, a complete 64-bit ecosystem.”

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