Apple Announces A7, World's First 64-bit Smartphone SoC
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2013 1:36 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- SoCs
- iPhone 5S
Apple just announced the iPhones 5S featuring the A7 SoC, which is the world's first consumer ARM based SoC with 64-bit support. We're likely talking about an updated version of Apple's Swift microprocessor with ARMv8 support.
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Daniel Egger - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Actually there's no need to have that much memory on iOS devices because it's far more memory efficient than either Windows Phone 8, BB10, Windows RT or Android. They won't put 4GB of memory on an iPad for a long time, maybe the next version will have 2GB if they find a sufficient use case for that but I'm sort of thinking not.DarkXale - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
The OS which suffers data loss in Safari with just 2 tabs open and where many apps have to dump undo states if they are switched from is more efficient?kyuu - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Is it? I'd like to see some data for that. All I know is that my work iPad2 is constantly having to refresh tabs in Safari due them being dumped for lack for memory.danbob999 - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
It has nothing to do with memory efficiency. The OS itself requires a tiny amount of RAM. When we are talking about 2-4 GB RAM on a tablet, most RAM is used by the applications themselves. Just take a look on your PC how much RAM your web browser is using. 1GB is not enough for a $600+ device released in 2013.solipsism - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Since when is the amount of RAM needed by a system dependent on how much that device costs?doobydoo - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
Because obviously if you spend more on a computer you expect it to be more capable. At a certain price point, reduced functionality may be acceptable - but he's saying that $600 isn't that price.extide - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Surprisingly enough, quad core CPU's in phones are nice. Honestly I think 3 cores are really all that is necessary but I can tell you there is a MASSIVE difference in performance between my Razr HD MAXX (2x1.5Ghz Krait) and my wife's HTC Ones (4x1.7Ghz Krait). And that is coming from first hand experience, not benchmarks or anything like that.andykins - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
I bet the software is completely different though so it's not exactly a fair comparison.tipoo - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
I agree on the three core thing. Two seems too few, even on the fastest hardware a background download and something just as graphically heavy as the app store can slow things to a crawl. 4 may seem excessive, 3 seems perfect but it's not feasible for mass fabrication.Hubb1e - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
Three seems good to me as well. All the benches seem to show that the 4th core is barely ever used so why not go with a 3 core? I had a 3 core Athlon and it was a great chip at the time.