Sometime in the future, iPhones will contain as much memory as a Mac or Windows PC. Apple’s iPad will become the notebook of the future, while versions of the Mac may run iOS as well.
It’s a future that might never come to pass. But leaving itself the option might be why Apple chose one of the industry’s 64-bit ARM chips to power the new iPhone 5S.
Apple internally designed the A7 chip within the new iPhone, although the chip’s core was licensed from ARM, the IP designer whose microprocessors power the vast majority of all smartphones today. As it stands now, there’s arguably little reason for Apple to do so.
Moving from 32- to 64-bits increases the addressable memory that the microprocessor can access. According to Kevin Krewell, the senior editor of-The Microprocessor Report, the maximum addresable memory for a 32-bit OS and processor is 4 gigabytes. Servers shifted to 64-bit OSes and microprocessors relatively quickly, given that enterprise applications and other high-performance computing problems required data sets that easily went beyond the 4-GB limit. At the present, however, only the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 approaches that, with 3 GB of memory. (Apple hasnt said how much memory the iPhone 5S has.)
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