Sometime in the future, iPhones might contain as much memory as a Mac or Windows PC. Apple’s iPad could 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 those options open might be why Apple chose one of the industry’s 64-bit ARM chips to power the new iPhone 5s.
Apple itself designed the A7 chip within the new iPhone, although the chip’s core was licensed from ARM, whose microprocessor designs 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 a microprocessor can access. According to Kevin Krewell, the senior editor of-The Microprocessor Report, the maximum addresable memory for a 32-bit operating system and processor is 4GB. 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 that 4GB limit. At present, however, only the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 approaches that, with 3GB of memory. (Apple hasnt said how much memory the iPhone 5s has.)
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