New iOS 7 to Offer 64bit OS - iPhone 5S A7 CPU (64-bit).. (better gaming?)

:haaaaaaaGay!.gif:

I haven't found how much memory these phones have yet which is where the big benefit of 64bit processing is supposed to be.

I noticed, they boast 64 bit but not if it has more than 4gb of memory to use

The iPhone 5 had 1GB of RAM..

which means the 5S probably has 2GB of RAM (deleted)

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Apple doesn't believe in tech details, just trust them.

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I would totally switch to an iPhone.... I would.. if it wasn't for the fact that I could never live under such an oppressive OS.

My s4 arrived at work today an the IT guy said he would switch it in the morning for me so I'm very excite!

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Just got my S4, what do I need to get?

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you have a gaming PC... so, use your phone for resources.. which means:

Steam
Netflix
ASTRO File Manager
Google Goggles
(If you have Plex, get the app, if you have a Roku, get he app, if you want a barcode scanner, get ShopSavvy)
Spotify, if you want to pay $8 for unlimited listening of any CD.. (I do this and download it to my phone, because it downloads them to my 64GB SD card, and I will never run out of space, or have to pay for a CD again. Already downloaded 25 CDs since I got my phone 2 weeks ago )
Get your bank app - or find a bank that has an android app (seriously, this has saved me so much headaches)
Amazon
Voice Search (update it, and put the google now widget on one of your screens, I could NOT live without this thing anymore)
Chrome (might already be installed?)
Weatherbug
Google Voice (and make it your default Voice Mail)
Splashtop Remote (if you want mirrored PC.. I do this to watch sports games on my phone from FrontRow Sports)

As a side note - if you don't like the default text messaging app, do some research on the current best one, there are a bunch out there, but I have used the default text app on my last 2 phones, because they do fine for me.

Well so far this is a dissapointment, it is dropping all my calls

I've been kind of a iPhone sheep since they were first released. I liked that it was simplistic and intuitive -- Shocking coming from me, I know, but I have completely different expectations from my mobile devices than I do from my PCs. Even more shocking, the technical specs and architecture do not interest me. It needs to work, and it better have all the apps I like, and I better be able to pirate apps with a jailbreak or root.

Bought the Original iPhone, followed by the 3gs, followed by the 4s. I'm due for an upgrade in March, and I have no idea what I'm going to do. The 4s seems to be the last good iPhone. Might be time to try something new.

Wish I could have a week to do a trial run with one of the "good" android phones. Everyone I know either has an iphone, some antique pre-smartphone device, or an older android device that runs like garbage -- which, sadly, is my only frame of reference for non-Apple smartphones.

I'm still running the most up-to-date version of iOS 5, though. Apple's iOS updates seem to be designed to make their older phones obsolete. Plus, there's no Jailbreak for the latest iOS 6 release.

Consequently, Words with Friends no longer works on my iOS.

Some of the more interesting comments I found on Anandtech.com

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64 means you can use 64 bit registers and arguments for instructions, typically per clock, so code that uses 64 arguments can be run faster, rather than spliting high precision / length instructions into two steps. This is especially good for reducing time spend on memory transactions, which means low power ram can be used, retaining high efficiency with improved performance. Plus this allows for virtualization (ARMs implementation) which can in turn mean sandboxing apps. Most apps may be natively written with 16 / 32 in mind, but using 64 does not necessarily mean they need to use loads of ram, using 16 megs of ram, with 64 bit registers can still yield performance boosts. This is essentially *doubling* the available resources / performance of the pipeline.

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Are the people who are implying 64-bit implies an automatic performance increase talking about x86? x86-64 is a weird case because you get twice the registers in long mode on an AMD64 CPU, which increases performance. That's not the case with other architectures, in fact outside of certain very specific usage cases (big scary scientific data processing) and the need to address more RAM - the performance difference is nil, or even worse a decrease due to shuffling about twice as much data... I can vouch for 32-bit userland being faster on the whole on UltraSPARC and PPC64 - I don't see why that wouldn't be the case on ARM unless there's something I don't know about the architecture.

But Apple have always been big on the marketing - they know 64-bit is useless on mobile... Of course the new architecture is very interesting for different reasons others have outlined here, but '64 bit' sounds impressive when you're faintly aware that previous mobile phones had 'less bits', no? Just like it did when Nintendo were marketing the N64....

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With 64bit you also get larger and, typically, more registers which are nothing but win.

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Exactly, bigger registers is what they are touting on the slides anyways. I am not an apple fanboy, but this is still exciting new for mobile, assuming develpers take advantage of it.

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It surprised me as well, but 64bit isn't useless on a device with smaller memory.

First, being able to operate on larger chunks of data is useful for a variety of tasks that have nothing to do with big integers.

Second, a larger unified address space could help with things like large memory mapped files in flash, which is already much larger than 4GB. I don't know, but I wonder if it is also useful for certainly security approaches, like address space randomization.

My best guess is that there are multiple factors behind making the move now: First and foremost, that they need to get their eventually. Given this, it is a question of timing. Arguments in favor of making the change sooner rather than latter: Minimizes one source of differences between OSX and iOS. Silicon design investment in new ISA, rather than legacy ISA. More GP registers, option for wider operations, "marketing." Arguments against would be increased cost due to die area and power consumption, it would seem that those considerations were less significant.

And then there is always the possibility that they are going to be using these chips in another class of device all together...

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Note that this is an ISA change with doubling the general purpose registers and floating point registers. Not just a 64 bit pointer, which by itself isn't useful in a phone at the moment.

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I'm guessing this is more about the future. Get developers writing in 64-bit APIs and in a year or two when we start seeing iPhones and/or iPads with 4+ GB of RAM we'll actually have applications that can take advantage of it.

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