How Will The A7 Chip (64-bit) Make The iPhone 5s Better?

It will make some apps a bit fast
Apple AAPL +1.26% uses lots of big words and hyperbole to make it sound like amazing things are occurring. In reality, though, what Apple did was move their custom ARM-based system-on-a-chip processors to 64-bits so that someday you could have iPads and iPhones with a lot more memory in them.
That day isn’t today. The iPhone 5S still has 1GB of memory (not storage, memory, the place where programs run) and you only need 64-bit chips when you want to go past 4GB of memory. And it’s important to note that most programs (almost 100% of them?!) will continue to be written in 32-bit code to support the 95+% of iPhones that won’t have the new A7 chip but will support the developer’s apps.
So that leaves Apple able to run mostly its own code faster and better on the new chip and some developers able to also take advantage. This is a good thing, but for Twitter and Facebook FB +0.02% and Gmail, you are not likely going to notice. In fact, those apps could all benefit more from code optimization than from trying to brute force better performance on the processor side. And by moving to more bits rather than just a faster clock speed, that brute forcing is unlikely to feel like a detectable improvement anyway.
For gaming, the situation might be different, because a lot of graphical functions call the processor directly and the graphics performance is said to be much improved. iPhone 5S will likely be a better gaming phone than all those that came before it (although quite arguably still the worst gaming smartphone by far due to its tiny screen).
By breaking out some functions related to sensing motion and such onto the M7 coprocessor, Apple gains the potential to allow those apps to function well while using minimal battery (they might allow the main processor to stay “asleep” while doing their work). But again, this is incremental and unlikely to benefit people who don’t use their phones for things like fitness apps.
If Dan is correct that the new chip is still a 32nm process one, then any meaningful uptick in battery life will have to come from the software side rather than hardware. My experience with iOS 7 indicates that it isn’t particularly thriftier than iOS 6, though perhaps final versions will do a bit better in that regard.
Over the next 2-3 years, the iPad and iPhone will find this new architecture moving down through the line (as will the AppleTV) and eventually developers can expect to find it there. That will make for more 64-bit optimized apps and improve performance that much more. But without a bigger transistor budget, more clock speed or more cores, the improvements will be more subtle or specialized. This time, you’ll probably see them in graphics. You might struggle to notice elsewhere.
This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Apple September 2013 iPhone Press Event:

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