When it comes to mobile gaming, the upcoming Google Nexus 5 could be one of the most impressive Android-powered smartphones to date. Leaked benchmarks that have surfaced online this week reveal the new device outperforms the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One in graphics performance, matching the new 64-bit iPhone 5s.
To the surprise of no one, Samsung’s co-CEO, Shin Jong-kyun revealed that the company is already working as hard as it can to make its own 64-bit processor to match the iPhone 5s’s new A7 chip.
When last we heard about Apple’s 64-bit aspirations, a notable CPU designer was saying that Apple couldn’t outrun Moore’s Law, and that the earliest Cupertino would manage to swing a 64-bit A7 processor was by 2014.
According to a new report by Fox News reporter Clayton Morris, though, Cupertino might have been juicing. A 64-bit A7 processor could be included in the iPhone 5S.
When the new iPhone 5 is officially released on Friday, it will be powered by Apple’s custom-designed A6 chip, a 1.2GHz, dual-core chip that is the first Cortex-A15 class CPU to market.
How did Apple get to this point? Just four years ago, they made their first step into custom chip design: now they are releasing cutting edge chips that are months ahead of the competition.
Over the weekend, Linley Gwennap, who heads the Linley Group chip consultacy, posted up a brief history of Apple’s chip development. It’s not just illuminating because of how we got here — from Apple buying up P.A. Semi in 2008 to signing secret deals with ARM — but in that it predicts when and what the next-gen A7 chip will look like.
Update: Apple has now released iTunes 10.4 which can be downloaded now via Software Update, of from Apple’s website.
Following the release of OS X Lion earlier today, Apple is set to drop an update to iTunes which will be 64-bit and will boast full-screen support.
Just a couple weeks ago, Apple updated their iLife suite up to the year 2011… but despite the fact that iLife ’11 requires Snow Leopard to run, Cupertino did not see fit to upgrade the executables to 64-bit…. even though programs like iMovie ’11 would certainly have benefited from the support.
What about Final Cut Studio, then? Last updated in July of 2009, Final Cut Studio is one of the top movie-editing software packages around… and it too could desperately benefit from some 64-bit support.
Evan Agee recently emailed Steve Jobs to see about Final Cut Studio, expressing his hopes of a 64-bit update to the package. As he’s sometimes wont to do, Apple’s CEO fired back a reply: “Stay tuned and buckle up.”
Adobe’s just released a new version of their Flash Player for Mac into the wild. Called “Square,” the latest version enables native 64-bit support on OS X, which Adobe hopes will result in a substantial speed boost for users running modern Macs.
On our end, we haven’t seen much improvement, short of a marginal (and perhaps imaginary) performance boost under 64-bit Safari. It still seems to take up just as many system resources as before.
Are any of our readers experiencing varying mileage with Adobe Flash Square? Let us know in the comments: we keep on rooting for Adobe to prove Steve Jobs wrong, but it still remains a slow and unacceptable system hog.
