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Apple stole a march on Android when it released the iPhone 5S with a 64-bit processor, and Android manufacturers have put the pedal to the metal in a race to catch up and make their products 64-bit. AnandTech reports that HTC has announced the Desire 510, its first 64-bit Android phone.
Meanwhile, AnandTech describe the device in more detail:
While normally one might expect high end phones to get the latest and greatest features first, this time we see a bit of a surprising reversal. The Desire 510 is HTC's first 64-bit phone, and the first announced device with Snapdragon 410. For those that aren't familiar with Snapdragon 410, it has four Cortex A53 CPU cores running at 1.2 GHz, along with an Adreno 306 GPU which suggests that it is a mild modification of the current Adreno 305 GPU that we see in the Snapdragon 400. Overall, this should make for a quite fast SoC compared to Snapdragon 400, as Anand has covered in the Snapdragon 410 launch announcement.
While it may seem strange that ARMv8 on Android phones is first to appear on a budget smartphone, it's quite easy to understand how this happened. Looking at Qualcomm's roadmap, the Snapdragon 810/MSM8994 is the first high-end SoC that will ship with ARMv8, and is built on a 20nm process. As 20nm from both Samsung and TSMC have just begun appearing in shipping chips, the process yield and production capacity isn't nearly as mature as 28nm LP, which is old news by now.
Other details include:
- SoC: MSM8916 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 410
- RAM/NAND: 1 GB RAM, 8GB NAND + microSD
- Display: 4.7” FWVGA (854x480)
- Network: 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 UE Category 4 LTE)
- Dimensions: 139.9 x 69.8 x 9.99mm
- Weight: 158 grams
- Camera: 5MP rear camera, .3MP/VGA FFC
- Battery: 2100 mAh (7.98 Whr)
- OS: Android 4.4 with Sense 6
- Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, DLNA
- SIM Size: MicroSIM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jasassin on Saturday August 30 2014, @02:25PM
What is the purpose of a 64bit CPU in a cell phone with less than 4 gigs of ram?
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 30 2014, @03:25PM
To force all your users to replace all their 32 bit apps when you stop supporting them.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday August 31 2014, @12:03AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by tonyPick on Saturday August 30 2014, @06:33PM
One possibility is: At least in part you can (eventually) ditch your 32 bit platforms, and reduce the number of SoC devices to support in your platform roadmap, so you end up using the same, or very similar, tools (compilers loaders, test harness, blah blah blah) throughout the product range for your next-gen platforms, which is a net win, even if you don't use the all the features in the simpler cases.
(Score: 3, Informative) by davester666 on Saturday August 30 2014, @07:08PM
it's not just about 64-bit address space, it also has a bunch more fp and gp registers, which means code doesn't have to dump stuff to memory as much, so for the same clock speed, 64 bit code actually runs faster.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday August 30 2014, @10:15PM
That's x86. The x86 architecture was not that well designed, and is register-starved. When AMD designed the x86-64 architecture, they took the opportunity to greatly increase the number of registers.
ARM CPUs don't have this limitation. ARMs have always had lots of registers.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday August 31 2014, @05:17AM
64-bit ARM has twice the number of GP and FP registers [32 each vs 16 each for 32-bit Cortex ARM cpus].
Apple claims that just recompiling for 64-bit ARM [at least for their chip] gives around a 30% speedup for cpu-dependent code vs the same 32-bit code on an iPhone 5S and other's have checked and confirmed it [of course it is approximate and depends on the specific code].
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Saturday August 30 2014, @07:19PM
Moving to 64-bit ARM gives a new architecture and extra registers which speed things up.
Plus it's ready for when phones do have more than 4GB memory.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 30 2014, @10:44PM
Public health. Via larger (thus heavier) battery needed and/or more frequent recharges (thus xtra effort to reach low placed power socket plugs [soylentnews.org]).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford