By John Paczkowski
When it ships on September 20, Apple's iPhone 5s will be the first and
only smartphone on the market powered by a 64-bit processor - but not
for long, if Samsung can help it.
J.K. Shin, Samsung's mobile chief, said Wednesday that his company also
has 64-bit devices in the pipeline. "Not in the shortest time, but yes,
our next smartphones will have 64-bit processing functionality,"
Shin told The Korea Times.
Samsung's current flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, runs a 32-bit
chip, which is plenty powerful for the tasks it performs. But like
Apple, the company is also looking ahead to an era of more
resource-intensive smartphone applications that will benefit from 64-bit
chips that can address larger amounts of memory.
That era's not quite here yet, though. Indeed, there's little to be
gained from slapping a 64-bit chip in today's smartphones, aside from
being the first to say you've done so.
"Adding 64-bit processor capabilities adds nothing to the user
experience today, as it would requires over four gigabytes of memory,"
Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy, and a former executive
at AMD, told
AllThingsD
. "Most phones today only have one to two gigabytes of memory and it will be years before the norm is four."
As Moorhead notes, in order to really take advantage of all that 64-bit
offers, you need a smartphone with more than 4GB of RAM. And that much
RAM requires significantly more power to run. And as Apple and Samsung
are both well aware, more than processing power battery life is of
paramount concern in today's smartphones.
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