Apple Announces A7, World's First 64-bit Smartphone SoC

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• stacey94 - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

  Mobile SoCs are hotplugged anyway... so if the 4th core isn't used, it would be shut off. So why would you want to take away a core some heavy application can potentially use? It's not like it's hurting you when it's not being used.

• Kevin G - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link

  The reason wouldn't be performance but better usage of die space. The area for an extra core could go to more cache, accelerators or bigger GPU. An SoC is balancing act of resources.

• easp - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

  This makes no sense. How is 3 not feasable for mass fabrication? Not that it really matters, because you haven't made a strong case for why 3 cores is more desirable than 2.
  
  If a background download slows things down to a crawl the software is either doing it wrong, or the bottleneck is elsewhere, like the wireless connection, or the speed of the flash memory.

• etre - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link

  Android works that way. It is using 2 cores, firing the 3th core under heavy load from time to time while the 4th core barely sees up-time at all. This is not a guess, but what most apps used for tweaking kernel settings will show you.
  
  So, I agree with the people above, at this moment, 3 cores processors will be enough. I don't know how much cost savings will enable this ...
  
  As for how fast is Krait 400 ... is fast. Coming from quad A9 to quad Krait 400 is very noticeable.
  
  Anyway, at this point, the biggest improvement will be for Google to drop java ... but I guess it will not happen.

• Roland00Address - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

  Your phones have different version of krait cores (200 vs 300) There is huge performance difference between said cores even if both your phones were quad cores, see here
  
  http://www.anandtech.com/show/6747/htc-one-review/...

• This Is It - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

  Not so fast, mate.
  
  Both are based from different Kraits to start with. On HTC One, it's actually based on Krait 300 (updated version of Krait) with higher DMIPS. Also, it's clocked much faster compared to OG Krait.
  
  And for the perceived performance (UI fluidity, gaming, etc), HTC One is also at advantage due to the newer generation of GPUs Adreno inside its Snapdragon 600.

• Jumangi - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

  Your talking totally subjective experience, on 2 different models of phones with different implementations of Android possibly running very different setups in apps, background tasks etc. In other words Apples to Oranges.
  
  A phone like the Moto X runs just fine with a duel core CPU just like iPhones do. More cores doesn't automatically mean better performance.

• tuxRoller - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

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

• ninjaquick - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

  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.

• easp - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

  The developers most apt to take advantage of it are the people working on the compilers for XCode. I'm guessing that most other developers will take advantage of it by checking the box to compile a version of their app for the new ISA, something Apple will probably start requiring for App Store acceptance anyway.
  
  I'm sure that there are some who will take more advantage of it, just as there have been some who still code critical codepaths in assember.