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  • jeffkibuule - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    64-bit didn't exist 6-months ago and now Chinese OEMs are almost requiring it? And then the strong hints that they also want 8-core chips too? I know vendor a want to satisfy their business partners but I wonder if it will ever reach a point of silliness. Only a matter of time until 16-core chips (I say that jokingly but there was a time when mentioning a 6" phone would get you laughed at, not nearly every major OEM makes one but Apple).
  • dennis.forbes - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    ARM has been trialing 64-bit designs for years now. I doubt Qualcomm's roadmap has been sped up at all.
  • Frenetic Pony - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    Things that are dumb: 8 cores. 64bit for Android today.

    Conclusion: This is friggen dumb.
  • helloworldv2 - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    64 bits for Android makes way more sense than 64 bits for iOS though. I mean, at least Android devices are closing in on actually shipping with more than 4GB of RAM. Meanwhile, the transition to 64 bits introduced nothing but pain for iOS, with the poster boy iPad Air constantly crashing due to low memory. This is what you get for having just 1GB of RAM while introducing higher RAM requirements in the form of a 64 bit OS. That was friggen dumb.
  • Penti - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    You don't exactly need processes (single programs) that uses more then 4GB ram on Android, the A15 arch already does support LPAE. You probably need it for other markets today already, but software stack needs to churn a bit to get proper support here. Especially for the android specific parts, parts that needs porting. Kernel and Bionic supports 64-bit already. That said, it takes a long time to bring something to the market in the semiconductor-segment.
  • sipos - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link

    What do you mean by bionic in "Kernel and Bionic supports 64-bit already"?
  • Infinitesimus - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    Well, the 64-bit introduction for iOS wasn't about addressing more memory. It was about vastly improved performance (the A7 is still one of the best ARM mobile chips out there ). It was definitely silly for Apple to be stingy with RAM in the new iPad Air but I think it was intentional. My suspicion is that they will release a "Pro" (or some other name) iPad that suplies ~2GB of RAM to work with. It will instantly give it an edge over the iPad Air.

    64-bit, when done right, focuses on performance advantages
  • solipsism - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    I don't get why people think 64-bit is only about addressing more RAM. Why no mention of the AArch64 ISA?
  • ZeDestructor - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    8cores, yes. 64bit, no. I've been getting OOM app closure on all of my android devices since my Nexus S. My Xperia Z did around 3 months before the OOM closures resumed (and I got it on the day it reached my carrier's store), although it's a lot better than the NS I had before it since I don't run OOM for the active app.... Android apps are not good with memory management.
  • Krysto - Wednesday, February 26, 2014 - link

    8-cores are definitely dumb, and just as I predicted, Qualcomm did it anyway.

    But 64-bit is definitely not. The more we delay moving to 64-bit, the longer the transition to ARMv8 will take, and make no mistake it's going to take YEARS as it is. And with ARM being stupid enough to STILL make new ARMv7 chips, I don't think we're going to see an ARMv8-only world until 2020.
  • r3loaded - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    I don't know who these Chinese customers are (OEMs or consumers?) but in my professional opinion in system architecture they are retarded. An Apple A7 will still outperform such a chip in mobile apps while pulling less power.
  • dennis.forbes - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    You've already benchmarked the 610/615 against the A7? Clearly you must have to make such an absolute pronouncement.
  • jerrylzy - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    I think it's Qualcomm themselves who said Octa-core is useless, and in their ads they said, "Faster cores, not more". Ironic.
  • Mondozai - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    "I think it's Qualcomm themselves who said Octa-core is useless, and in their ads they said, "Faster cores, not more". Ironic."

    In a way, yes, but they have to go where the market is. In the end, China is responsible for 50% of their revenues as a company. If all the Chinese vendors demand 8 core CPUs, even if it doesn't make sense, can they afford to ignore that market? Mediatek and Allwinner can both supply 8 core CPUs and they have the advantage of being largely Chinese companies(ethnically, not geographically, speaking).

    As Anand said, Qualcomm may not have a choice. Ultimately, the market will calm down and pragmatism will rule.

    Also, 2 core CPUs have long been better suited for smartphones, yet why has Qualcomm persisted in using Quad cores? So it's not like they are consistent with their supposed purity from an engeering standpoint. Nobody is, except Apple, which seems immune from market trends(case in point, screen size, microUSB, NFC etc).
  • mfmx - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    What a bunch of hypocrites, half a year ago they said 8-cores are dumb: http://www.itworld.com/hardware/367591/qualcomm-ca...

    They also made a video presentation of why 8-cores were dumb... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdauwqhmsas
  • dennis.forbes - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    Even if that were an official company value statement -- instead of something a later silenced VP said (he also said that 64-bit was silly at the same time, which Qualcomm quickly distanced themselves from. And note that he was specifically referring to putting many very weak cores together -- lawnmower to Ferrari engine -- which the A53 is most certainly not) -- that doesn't in any way make them hypocrites: You can not agree with the direction of something while still making money from those consumers who demand it.
  • mfmx - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    The "weak cores" is a strawman argument, as the processor he discusses has the most powerful individual cores yet on a MediaTek processor. Also the Snapdragon 615 will have "weak cores" compared to a Snapdragon 800...
  • dennis.forbes - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    The 615/10 architecturally have the simpler A53, but they also have the ARMv8 extensions that should yield benefits for appropriate workflows. Much of the performance gain of the Apple A7 (the ARM processor world has truly the worst naming going. So many collisions) -- substantial gains -- came from those extensions.
  • BMNify - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link

    no actually , look at the 6* specs, they have an intentional crap 64bit "single" ram channel to cripple them against the 8* series running far faster ram, if the Chinese markets had stipulated new lowest power wideio and/or HMC controller blocks, all the worlds consumers would have been far better off in the medium term...
  • Jeffrey Bosboom - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    This feels similar to the 'megahertz myth' way back when: it's easy to market 'faster' processors, so Intel taught consumers to compare clockspeeds, which then led them into the technical dead-end that was NetBurst, and then they had to both reset technically and convince consumers to not do what their marketing had just spent years telling them to do.

    It's not quite the same here because it's OEMs making these demands, and Qualcomm has their own IP stack that (hopefully) won't be caught up in this. It's still frustrating as a technically knowledgeable user that these marketing concerns will be controlling what I can buy for the immediate future.

    Also, is there an eight-blade razor yet?
  • Aenean144 - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    "Also, is there an eight-blade razor yet?"

    My electric shaver has like 100 razors! They are small, but they spin real fast!
  • BillBear - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    You are aware that the memory address space is far from the only thing that changed going to ARM's A64 ISA, aren't you?

    I guess not.
  • Mondozai - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    "It also highlights a serious weakness in ARM's roadmap: anyone looking to build a 64-bit performance mainstream SoC is forced into tons of low power cores rather than fewer, higher IPC cores. We need a 64-bit version of the Cortex A17."

    Wouldn't call 4 cores "tons of cores", Anand. You can get a low-power 64-bit Quadcore SoC using ARM tech. But yes, there is a performance gap.

    Nevertheless, A-57 will be out this year H2. What's the rush? ARM recognizes the competition to get to 64 bit has more than a shade of gimmicks over it, at least as long as there is no 4 gigabyte smartphone, which will likely coincide with the first A-57 designs.
  • winterspan - Monday, February 24, 2014 - link

    8 x ARM Cortex A53 is just about the dumbest SoC architecture someone could conceive of... Why don't they just go back to an ARM11.. they could probably put 16 or 32 of them on a 20nm process.
  • rango - Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - link

    how does Adreno 405 stack up against Addre320? how much powerful it is from 320
  • Rama TT - Sunday, December 28, 2014 - link

    I really don't think its a dumb thing to do. The thing is most Asian markets believe that bigger is better. So when it comes to screen resolution or core counts. BIGGER IS BETTER. Take for example G3's QHD display which was totally not required at least on a 5.5 inch smartphone. We know that a powerful dual core processor can carry out most of the tasks with relative ease and consume less power but its not that easy to make the average Joe of China understand the same. Plus 8 cores really add a bonus in marketing. Tell someone that you have a octa core processor running under the hood and they go all nuts over your smartphone.

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