iPhone 5S Packs Apple A7 Chip: World's First 64-bit Phone

By Marcus Yam
published

Apple ups processing power in the iPhone 5S in a big way.

Apple just revealed the A7 chip that'll be inside each iPhone 5S device, which the company is boasting is the world's first 64-bit smartphone.

Among the claims are a 64-bit desktop-class architecture, modern instruction set, twice the number of general purpose and floating point registers. All of that comes to over 1 billion transistors packed in a 102mm2 die.

Apple also said that iOS 7 is completely reengineered for 64-bit with native kernel, libraries and drivers. All the built-in apps are reengineered, and developers will see a seamless transition.

The A7 chip is making some big performance claims over the A6. Apple says the A7 in the iPhone 5S is twice as fast as the A6 in the iPhone 5 and 5C.

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Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
48 Comments Comment from the forums
  • captainnemojr
    Doesn't Apple always claim the new chips are 2X faster than the old chips anyway?
    Reply
  • kenyee
    64-bit also makes apps 30% larger...at least that's what we found w/ x86 chips.

    Arm v8 (64-bit) has been around for a while...only at the server level...neat that Apple managed to get this into their custom chip.
    Reply
  • captainnemojr
    Double post.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    Oh no... now we have to explain what 64bit means for an OS again.

    Will the device ever run more than 4GB of ram? Will it be executing instructions which require more than 32bits of accuracy? Well then you get a minor performance boost for a few 32bit instructions which can be combined into a single 64bit instruction, but are otherwise adding bloat to the OS.

    Overall, probably a good thing in the long run because there will be a day when phones DO have 4+GB of ram, but it is not going to be the magic bullet that Apple will no doubt market it as.
    Reply
  • captainnemojr
    Is Tom's ever going to fix this double/triple posting bug?
    Reply
  • captainnemojr
    Reply
  • teh_chem
    So...this 64-bit business. Does it have any immediate impact for the current hardware platform? Anyhoo, I don't much like Apple, but it does seem pretty forward-looking, so I respect them for that.

    The fingerprint scanner...hopefully it works a bit better than android's face rec--I used face rec for a long time, but it became cumbersome to only work some of the time. Curious where the fingerprint goes...iCloud?

    Well, I'm curious how the new hardware coupled with iOS 7 is going to push things. Will it mean more competition for Android (and possibly windows) platforms? Or is it just more of the same-old.

    Also, I wonder how much the introduction of the 5C is going to impact market share, or if it'll just cannibalize their current established markets, where people opt for the cheaper version vs. the standard one.
    Reply
  • Honis
    They made the announcement that the finger print is stored only locally.

    I'm not familiar with the standard 64bit addition. Is it the 32bit instructions with 32 more instructions added (same instructions just extended to 64bit addressing) or do the original 32bit instructions get replaced with an always 64bit equivalent and the new 32bits of instructions add new functionality.
    Reply
  • MANOFKRYPTONAK
    This is interesting, I wonder how well this will perform. I think its a step in the right direction, IF apple doesn't screw it up. Hopefully they wont and this becomes the new standard.
    Reply
  • vmem
    hmm, for once there's something exciting from apple from a pure hardware standpoint

    Hmm, the chances are slim, but I can see Apple making a bid to buy out AMD (completely or partially) for it's patent portfolio
    Reply