

Anand Chandrasekher  (Source: itnews)
Chandrasekher's comments come back to bite him in the butt


Source: CNET

Comments     Threshold


RE: Just wow...
By TakinYourPoints on 10/25/2013 7:01:23 PM , Rating: 2
That is a terrible argument for two reasons, one is that there have already been performance improvements in actual applications running on the same hardware just by moving over from a 32-bit version to 64. The other is that the "laziness" afforded by more capable hardware is an awful excuse for... anything really.

Would you rather things stopped improving so that developers have to work harder at optimizing software towards an inferior result? That makes no sense.

RE: Just wow...
By coburn_c on 10/25/2013 7:12:03 PM , Rating: 2
A 40-60% increase claim is garbage.

Also that depends on what you definition of improving is. Bloated, unoptimized fart apps with more animation than substance is not an improvement to me. What app are you running on your phone that needs over 2 gigs of memory space.

And that is the only reason for moving to 64 bit hardware. There are better ways of gaining performance, PAE for greater than 4GB total memory addresses, no current 64 bit software, and no other features that require 64 bit architecture.

RE: Just wow...



RE: Just wow...
By inighthawki on 10/26/2013 3:28:10 AM , Rating: 2
I see you have clearly never done any work at all in a kernel, any low level development, or many performance critical applications such as game engines where 64-bit operations are extremely common, and you will see a noticeable improvement when properly programmed.

There are tons of uses for 64-bit programming:
-Virtual address space ranges
-IO (seek offsets have been 64-bit values since forever ago)
-Time related functionality (64-bit performance counters)
-Unique identifiers (Many counters can roll over too easily on 32-bit)
-If the hardware doesn't already contain 128-bit SIMD functionality (which according to you, why would they?) you already also gain the ability to read (and write) twice as much memory over the bus at a time - simple operations like memcpy will see an immediate improvement (not 2x, but a big leap forward)
-64 bit registers make atomic operations on 64-bit data values actually possible, which reduces the necessity to perform multiple expensive interlocked operations and lock contention.

The list goes on. I don't know why you don't acknowledge these scenarios unless you simply do not know they exist.

RE: Just wow...
By Monkey's Uncle on 10/26/2013 7:11:37 PM , Rating: 2
Well, there is a simple cure for you.

Keep your current smartphone (if you have one) and never upgrade it.

Apple has let the genie out of the bottle by implementing their A7. To compete and move forward, everybody else is doing the same. So like it or lump it - 64-bit is coming. So stick your head in the sand and hope you never have to buy a 64-bit device or you can stay on the bleeding edge. The choice is yours.

Just remember though:
When you stick your head in the sand - your ass is sticking up in the air.

RE: Just wow...
By chripuck on 10/28/2013 2:39:36 PM , Rating: 2
Oh heaven's man, nobody is saying 64 bit has no benefit. The only point of contention is selling it as a marketable feature. I have the 5S and it's super smooth, but I can't say that there's a noticeable difference from my 5 with both on iOS 7.

I don't have the extensive knowledge of low level programming required to make an extensive argument for or against 64 bit, but I do know the single largest benefit is addressing larger amounts of RAM and simplifying larger mathematical operations. I would posit that only a small fraction of iOS users utilize Apps that benefit from these improvements.

I agree that it's a step in the right direction. But I think it's silly to paint Apple as being so innovative when it was the next natural evolution of mobile processors. Everybody and their brother (in the tech community) knew it was coming and while Apple beat everyone's expectations by 6 months to a year, it's not a game changer so lets' stop acting like it is.

