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According to reports out of Korea, Samsung has nearly completed development of what will be the first 64-bit chip in their Exynos lineup. While there are still a few technical and logistical issues to iron out, barring any crazy set backs the new CPU will debut in the Samsung Galaxy S5.
Rumors say the chip will utilize a 14nm process and be based on ARM’s big.LITTLE platform, much like the current Exynos 5 octa. The eight-core chip would deploy Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 cores with the ability to push all cores simultaneously while offering reduced power consumption. It would mark the first time Samsung has offered a 64-bit processor in one of their smartphones.
It would not, however, be the first smartphone to utilize a 64-bit chip. That honor goes to Apple with the A7 CPU found in the iPhone 5S (and now iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display). While the need for 64-bit processing at the mobile level has been a topic of debate, more manufacturers appear committed to moving in that direction. Count Samsung among them.
[via ITToday.co.kr]
I don’t understand why apple and Samsung are going with 64-bit since the mobile architecture is still far and away unable to utilize it. It’s like putting a V-8 on a skateboard. Yeah its got a ton of power but you’re not going anywhere with it.
The main reason is RAM. With 4GB RAM or more, it’s more efficient to be on 64 bit than 32 bit.
Exactly. The hardware just isn’t at the point to take advantage yet. But a lot of people in the non-tech world know that their pc runs at 64-bit so they’ll assume that it’s great that their phone does too. It’s purely a marketing point right now.
Future proofing, my friend. The mobile world evolves fast. At least it’ll be there when we can actually take advantage of it.
That’s pretty much how I feel about it, myself. Useless at the moment but it’s a great direction to be going. I’m just worried about form factor and size. My HTC One is still slightly awkward to hold sometimes due to the size, but I’m adapting. I think going too much bigger won’t feel right for me personally but the market is obviously there so hopefully it will do well until they can condense the chips down in the future.
They do because ARM does, and ARM does because it’s a logical evolution.
Switching today drives developpers work and will facilitate the inevitable transition
You’re starting to contradict yourself here with the whole “Apple designs chips from scratch” argument. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A7
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1699962-apples-new-64-bit-arm-a7-chip-is-absolutely-amazing
http://www.chipworks.com/en/technical-competitive-analysis/resources/blog/inside-the-a7/
http://www.phonearena.com/news/iPhone-5s-Apple-A7-processor-specs-speed-RAM-GPU-other-details-revealed_id47669
http://www.chipworks.com/en/technical-competitive-analysis/resources/blog/inside-the-iphone-5s/
Your first link debunks your own “proof” with “While not the first 64-bit ARM CPU,[9] AnandTech makes the claim that the A7 chipset “is the world’s first consumer ARM based [system-on-a-chip] with 64-bit support.”
Maybe you should understand what “ARM” means:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
Notice this snippet in particular: “developed by British company ARM Holdings, who have designed and licensed a family of computer processors that use these instruction set architectures; some other companies have also designed processors that use the ARM architectures.”
I’ll say it again, Apple is NOT in the “Chip business” and NEVER has been! ORDERING is not “designing” LOL.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/2
Well we know Samsung is sound it because Apple is
What I want to know, is what the hell happened last night at the Google Play event? There is absolutely zero info on it! I’d have an easier time getting the meeting minutes to the last 5 meetings at the Masonic temple down the street than what went down with the Goog last night.
And I thought I was the only one that remembered there was some kind of event last night. I’ve searched all over and have found nothing!!!!. My guess is they made everyone at the event sign an NDA.
The “honor” of first smartphone to utilise 64-bit processor goes to Apple?
Sure why not, the Apple’s A7 CPU is made by Samsung. You can skin the phone however you want, but the “brains” are still Samsung. And everything 64-bit in that phone is Samsung and not Apple.
It doesn’t go to Apple actually Huawei did it in 2012
Bullshit.
angry fanboy aren’t you?
No. It’s actually bullshit :-D
yeah Techradar is bullshit… you, random poster, are the absolute reference.
Come on Dan. One mysterious, unique, 64 bit ARM SoC from china… even before ARMv8 instruction set existed ? This doesn’t make sense at all.
I think Huawei never clarified the ISA, so the press assumed it was ARM-based. It could be a MIPS though–I wouldn’t be surprised since the Chinese have been producing MIPS-based Android devices for a while, and 64-bit MIPS mobile SOC’s were available last year.
I don’t understand.
Specs for the D Quad indicate a HiSilicon (Huwaei) K3V2 processor. This is just a regular quad Cortex-A9/Mali, very similar to the Exynos 4 powering the Galaxy S3. None of this is 64 bit.
http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-124131-hisiliconmobileapplicationprocessork3v2smartphones.htm#.UmwHKnkazCQ
No. Samsung is only the fab. The “brains” designing Apple chips are Apple engineers. Get your facts.
The brains designing the chip is all ARM. Apple like Samsung license the technology to produce the chips.
No Dean. You still don’t get it. Apple designs its ARM-compliant cores from scratch whereas Samsung licenses ARM’s Cortex cores. It’s very different.
Apple pays ARM for use of their technology, as does Samsung and Qualcomm who create their own versions using ARM’s designs. They all pay ARM for every device they sell.
zourite please give a credible source of ONE chip apple has “designed from scratch”. They first used Motorola, and now Intel in their laptops/desktops. Apple has NEVER been in the chip business. OS? Yes. ASICs? NO.
Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/2) :
“A7 SoC Explained
I’m still surprised by the amount of confusion around Apple’s CPU cores, so that’s where I’ll start. I’ve already outlined how ARM’s business model works, but in short there are two basic types of licenses ARM will bestow upon its partners: processor and architecture. The former involves implementing an ARM designed CPU core, while the latter is the creation of an ARM ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) compatible CPU core.
NVIDIA and Samsung, up to this point, have gone the processor license route. They take ARM designed cores (e.g. Cortex A9, Cortex A15, Cortex A7) and integrate them into custom SoCs. In NVIDIA’s case the CPU cores are paired with NVIDIA’s own GPU, while Samsung licenses GPU designs from ARM and Imagination Technologies. Apple previously leveraged its ARM processor license as well. Until last year’s A6 SoC, all Apple SoCs leveraged CPU cores designed by and licensed from ARM.
With the A6 SoC however, Apple joined the ranks of Qualcomm with leveraging an ARM architecture license. At the heart of the A6 were a pair of Apple designed CPU cores that implemented the ARMv7-A ISA. I came to know these cores by their leaked codename: Swift.
At its introduction, Swift proved to be one of the best designs on the market. An excellent combination of performance and power consumption, the Swift based A6 SoC improved power efficiency over the previous Cortex A9 based design. Swift also proved to be competitive with the best from Qualcomm at the time. Since then however, Qualcomm has released two evolutions of its CPU core (Krait 300 and Krait 400), and pretty much regained performance leadership over Apple. Being on a yearly release cadence, this is Apple’s only attempt to take back the crown for the next 12 months.
Following tradition, Apple replaces its A6 SoC with a new generation: A7.”
Using an EDA to implement “the ARMv7-A ISA” does not constitute “designed from scratch”! They took off the shelf architecture and an existing ARM ISA and called it macaroni! For the love of all things holy, please go take a basic ASICs course before posting any more tripe.
Wes, you’re playing on words. I only meant that they own their processor design and decide what feature to emphasize on, whereas Samsung just can’t because they use Cortex cores like the rest.
Obviously, only one chip is able to crush benchmarks with a dual core running at 1,3GHz.
No Samsung fab, no Apple chip. All Samsung has to do is say no and goodbye Apple
They can’t say no to billions of dollars. What would Samsung do with useless massive fabs ? 90% of the chips they produce are Apple’s.
BTW, Apple is moving away, at least partially, so this dependency is about to end next year.
There’s a reason why Apple is missing out on many hardware features such as more ram, etc. Apple can’t make anything by itself so it has to go shopping for parts and companies to put it together.
It’s a big deal when Motorola makes its phones in the US because the US stopped building things for the most part.
90% eh? Source? I dunno, that galaxy series of phones seem to be doing pretty well. TVs too. Apple is “moving away” because Samsung is eating them for LUNCH and Samsung DOES NOT CARE if it pisses off “almighty Apple”. They don’t NEED them!
“Apple’s 2012 share of Samsung’s total foundry sales was 89%.”
http://www.icinsights.com/data/articles/documents/488.pdf
There actually was an android phone back in 2012 that had a 64 bit chip. Too lazy to dig it up, but I’ve posted it several time in response to Fanboys saying Apple was first.
The author is an iSource writer, and self proclaimed iPhanboy. It’s not at all surprising that he wasn’t aware of this. Thanks for pointing it out.
Total bullshit. This Huawei has a K3V2 SoC : Cortex-A9 cores -> 32 bits !!!
Apple’s A7 is first 64bits ARM chip sold, like it or not.
Of coarse Apple playing up the 64 bit angle at the 5S launch does not jive with Apple’s philosophy of keeping features limited to the most useful. I would say you can’t have it both ways, but with the state of American tech journalism, if your Apple — you can have it any way you want.
Even more impressive is that the K3V2 is a 64-bit processor, rather than the standard 32-bit offered in other phones.
Look it up:
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/huawei-ascend-d-quad-is-as-powerful-as-a-64-bit-pc-1066474
http://blog.laptopmag.com/hands-on-with-the-worlds-fastest-smartphone-the-huawei-ascend-d-quad
Right but android doesn’t run 64 bit. iOS 7 does.
What happened to the Ascend D?
This processor won’t be in the American version so I really don’t care lol. Also, I don’t think it’ll make much, if any, difference in performance in the near future.
No, but I am curious what the power savings from the big.LITTLE architecture will be..
If Samsung wants me to buy the S5, put in 4GB of RAM instead of 3GB like the Note III has.
why?
First off, 3GB of RAM is just odd. I understand 1GB was the selling point a year or two ago. 64 Bit Processors are meant to have a lot of RAM tied to it, so why not make the most of the architecture right now?
It has a lot to do with hardware real estate. Trying to pack 4GB in with all the other components just isn’t really feasible yet. Maybe on giant phablets (even bigger than the Note 3) but not on your standard 4″-5″ phone that currently dominates the market. I could be wrong but I don’t see 4GB of ram within the next two years
You’re mad if you think 1 GB to 3 GB in a year is gonna slow down for years, absolutely crazy.
if they can fit 3gb, most probably they can fit 4gb using POP.
Actually, the phablets will get it for sure, especially the Note 4. I think the S4 getting it is realistic, but not going to happen since these devices are designed months in advance before launch and production, so the phone is probably sitting there with 64 bit archtecture with 3 GB of RAM. I have no problem with that, but if I really want to upgrade every year, I need to see why 1.7 GHz and 2 GB of RAM is obsolete.
If you play around with 3D graphics like I do, 4 GB isn’t enough.
But then again, that’s only a small portion of a consumer base, so they’re not going to make a product with 6 or 8 next year. Phoneblocks would be a good phone for you if it materializes.
It’s possible, a Chinese manufacturer is putting it in their phone which will retail for something like $300 over there.
http://www.gizchina.com/2013/09/03/4gb-ram-snapdragon-800-hasee-super-phone-cost-just-293-full-specifications/
The question is if Samsung wants to go that far in specs when they probably don’t need to. Personally I don’t like odd numbers like 3GB of ram, feels shoehorned, like laptops with a 1GB dimm and a 2GB dimm, far better to just have 2 2GB sticks or 2 1GB sticks. RAM in phones is a bit different, but still.
Good point … unfortunately Apple lowered the bar by harping on a point that they have a 64 bit chip & focused on how they were the first instead of portraying what benefit the customer would receive (hint minuscule improvement right now , long term = more than 4gb of ram can be used).
Considering the mass of phone buyers aren’t thoroughly educated in the intricacies of technology It’s just easier for Samsung to say “ok we got a 64 bit chip now too” instead of trying to educate people that 64 bit in phones aren’t a big deal right now & it’s more about preparing for the future.
Anything less than 4GB cannot take advantage of 64-bit addressing..
No. Get your facts.
You get your facts straight. Perhaps you are getting confused with RAM and storage. Addressable RAM is dependent on the chip architecture, storage is not. I also explicitly stated 64-bit addressing in my post, not 64-bit architecture.
I will give you some basics about addressing to help you learn. You can determine the number of bytes addressable by taking 2 to that power. 32-bit address can at most access 4,294,967,296 bytes of data.
32-bit addresses can only access up to 4 GB, theoretically; but in practice it can be less. For example, 32-bit Windows could only access like 3.25 GB of memory.
Funny. Really funny. What a simple world you live in.
You can get your facts again :-)
You have no facts. You just state nothing
That’s because I’m fed up with blindfolded fanboys.
Seriously Dean, 64 bit computing enables massive performance rise, and it’s not related to the amount of RAM (a Cortex A15 can use 40 bit RAM addressing via LPAE). Just ACCEPT the fact that it’s a good thing EVEN if this ugly awful Apple is the one that put it to the market.
You’re the fanboy. I did not criticize Apple at all. Your claims for 64-bit are dubious, at best. Memory is the main reason for pushing higher bit addressing. It always has been.
Apple’s move to 64-bit was more for their future devices than it was for the 5S or iPads. 64-bit does not necessarily mean faster performance. However, it does mean bigger programs.
By the way, any process on the Cortex A15 can only access a max of 4GB.
You’re right in the RAM addressing, but that’s not the only thing. If the OS is coded for it, it can grab data 2 32bit chunks at a time. Increasing throughput. it can crunch larger numbers with greater precision as well. Though I haven’t seen anything from Apple confirming it does that. So IMO it’s put up or shut up for Apple on EXACTLY what it’s doing that makes it “better” (Chime in anytime here zourite). In the meantime, it’s an intermediary step to the full update and IS just marketing and bragging rights.
Don’t show the world your ignorance. It is very embarrassing, a lot of people are reading your post.
Muhahahaha !
Not sure why you’re focusing on 64-bit addressing when the point of the new CPUs is 64-bit processing.
If you read the post I responded to, it had to do with someone asking why the original poster wanted an SG5 with 4GB rather than 3GB like the Note 3. So the thread was about RAM which a 64-bit program can take full advantage of 4+ GB memory. Also, the biggest benefit of 64-bit processing is that a process can access memory larger than 4 GB.
64-bit processing is the next evolutionary step, but it does not guarantee faster performance. One advantage of 64-bit processing is greater floating point precision. I am not quite sure this would be a great advantage since many Android programs are written with the SDK which is Java based. For Android programs written with the native development kit, 64-bit would clearly allow for greater precision provided a 64-bit compiler is used. 64-bit programs however will mean larger program size.
because it’s much more usefull than a quad core CPU
Why not?
Well, the 64-bit processor in the iPhone 5S is manufactured by Samsung, isn’t it?
Yes. Manufactured. Not designed. The A7 is Apple’s IP.
Really, it is mostly ARM IP that Apple and Samsung license to use.
with a fingerprint sensor and in gold!
So NSA can have another copy of your finger prints right ?
So samsung 14 nm process is reaady for mass produce next year?
Doubtful, but let the people dream.
honestly i was surprise to see that. it is interesting to discuss the possibility of 64 bit ARM processor but when i see article mention samsung will come out 14nm next year it made me thinking how legit this article about next exynos. right now even intel seems struggling with their 14nm and they were one of the most advance player in fabrication process.
If no Nexus 5 on Verizon, I’m holding out for the GS5. It’ll kick some ass.
Samsung doesn’t move in any direction, nor Apple for that matters. ARM does.
Again, contradicting yourself with the truth. How does that feel?
No. I’m perfectly aware that ARM drives every evolution of his proprietary instruction set.
Every SoC from now on will implant ARMv8 ISA, be it in ARM-designed cores (Cortex line, Samsung way) or by designing in-house cores (a la Qualcomm Krait or Apple Cyclone).
And then, like usual, they replace it in the US variant with a Snapdragon.
can’t blame samsung for that. they do it because Americans forced them to do it.
Not true at all, they do it because they can’t manufacture enough of their own chips for worldwide consumption, they sold 40 million Galaxy S4’s in 6 months. It is not an easy task to make enough chips for all those phones.
doesn’t make sense. that theory would be true if it’s the other way around(exynos for US, qualcomm for international).
and like usual, the snapdragon version will be better
Qualcomm hasn’t mentioned anything about 64 bit, they definitely don’t seem to be on course for ARM v8 cpu’s for phones next year, and they sure as hell won’t have 14nm production, most likely 22nm, then again I find the rumor of Samsung going that small to be dubious at best, but still.
i wasnt even referring to 64 bit, i was simply saying to the OP whom i inferred was disappointed by snapdragon replacing exynos in the US, that over the past few years, the snapdragon chip has been at least as good or better than the exynos, Especially when it comes to battery life.
If Samsung put 64bit CPU, then there’s no more excuse not to put RAM 4GB and up. This is the main advantage of 64, how much memory you can address.
Apple on the other hand used 64bit merely as marketing. They installed 64bit CPU but with 1GB of RAM.. what’s the point, to fool the uneducated people?
Apple used a 64 bit CPU because They have moved on to ARMv8, which is better than ARMv7 in every way.
But why so skimpy on ram?
Have you ever seen an iPhone run out of memory? I haven’t.
Is that the reason why iPhone can’t open 2 apps at the same time? For example, texting while watching youtube. The last generation Note 2 and S3 can even multi-window, and those device are ancient, in perspective to modern phone lifespan.
The Youtube app won’t play videos in the background regardless. I know what you’re saying though, but iOS7 does allow apps to run in the background. Multi Window is nice, but it definitely wouldn’t see any benefit on a screen smaller than 5.
Why would you want to run 2 apps at the same time on a 4 inch screen .__.
Because it only runs the Application that’s in the foreground.
As of iOS7, apps can run in the background.
It is better but not because it has 64 bit. And the sad truth is, Apple is telling people that the increase of performance is the inclusion of 64 bit addressing.. nope.. The increase in performance is so technical and complicated they cannot use it for marketing… people wont just understand.
So what Apple did to simplify things. They picked the term “64bit” which is a familiar term and used it for marketing.. Apple:”Our CPU is now faster because it is 64 bit”…. more simplier but BuII$h!t
Not really… The 64bit memory space also allows better ASLR, addressing devices doesn’t take away from the 4GB limit 32bit has, more registers to work with so you don’t have to fetch instructions and data onto the processor from the cache as often…
Yes, banking on the fact they know 95% of their user base of soccer moms and teeny boppers has no idea what it is or means, just thinking 64-bit? Cool!
Speaking about CPU’s wonder what Intel has up its sleeve? Wonder if it will finally be fast enough to compete and suck less power. They promised all this stuff for Christmas yet the rumor mill has been quiet as to what that stuff will be. Maybe because of Broadwell being delayed?
http://www.techglen.com/
Should have been on the Note 3 but nooooooooooo… we get the crapdragon
With Samsungs bloated, mostly useless sw features; it will still studder and lag.