Qualcomm Employee: 64-Bit A7 Chip 'Hit Us In The Gut'
Earlier this year, after Apple released the first 64-bit chip for smartphones, a Qualcomm spokesperson claimed the A7 processor was a "marketing gimmick" and that there is "zero benefit" to the consumer from the chip. Those comments were later walked back before the executive who made them was reassigned.
Now, Dan Lyons -- the former Fake Steve Jobs and tech columnist -- writes at HubSpot that the A7 chip "hit [Qualcomm] in the gut", according to an unnamed Qualcomm employee.
"The 64-bit Apple chip hit us in the gut," says the Qualcomm employee. "Not just us, but everyone, really. We were slack-jawed, and stunned, and unprepared. It’s not that big a performance difference right now, since most current software won’t benefit. But in Spinal Tap terms it’s like, 32 more, and now everyone wants it."
[...]
"The roadmap for 64-bit was nowhere close to Apple’s, since no one thought it was that essential," the Qualcomm insider says. "The evolution was going to be steady. Sure, it’s neat, it’s the future, but it’s not really essential for conditions now."
But once Apple introduced a 64-bit processor, all the other phone-makers wanted one too. "Apple kicked everybody in the balls with this. It’s being downplayed, but it set off panic in the industry."
Since the launch of the iPhone 5s, Apple has gone on to put its flagship A7 64-bit processor in the latest iPad and iPad mini models, in addition to the iPhone 5s.
Both Samsung and Qualcomm have announced that their future smartphone processors will be 64-bit. For Apple, though many apps will not take advantage of the increased speed of the A7 processor, some apps -- Djay and Vjay for example -- do see significant speed improvements with the new processor.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments
1. Apple releases a new product.
2. Competitors gripe that it's a worthless upgrade.
3. Apple sells tons of devices.
4. Competitors rush to make their devices like Apple's.
It's already been established that there are more benefits to a 64-bit architecture than an increase in RAM capacity.
No, I don't care to elaborate. You can search ANY thread that mentions "64-bit". :rolleyes:
Apple's pretty much one of the rare companies that already have the experience and skills to pull it off without major issues (68x > PPC, PPC > Intel).
For anybody else climaining there's no point of A7 without the extra RAM, A7 is far more than just a 64-bit chip, it has a completely new arch that will speed up many type of processes without having the extra memory.
Safari issues are software issues first, not hardware issues. Apple never really optimized Safari to use the memory efficiently, they haven't done it in a few years.