Apple latest iPhone 64-bit has received glowing reviews, however, the general consensus what that this technology will be more useful in the future.
“For chip nerds the idea of 64-bit chip inside a smartphone is overkill,” Stacey Higginbotham writes for Gigaom. “The benefits of a 64-bit chip is that is can take advantage of 4 gigabytes of addressable RAM, but most smartphones are barely hitting 2 or 3 GB of RAM today. Plus, the operating system has to be tweaked to run on a 64-bit chip.”
However, others believe the new 64-bit architecture could benefit consumers today.
“The ability to access more RAM will definitely be necessary in the future, but it’s ARMv8’s 64-bit architecture that’ll start paying off immediately,” Aaron Souppouris reports for The Verge. “Extra registers — tiny units of storage inside the processor — let the A7 crunch numbers more efficiently, improving performance significantly for tasks like encoding and decoding video. Thanks in part to this, but mainly to its increased core count, higher clock speed, and improved GPU, the new iPhone 5s will likely fly through iOS apps with an aplomb never seen before.”
The folks at Algoriddim concur with Souppouris and set about taking advantage of the 64-bit support in the iPhone 5s. They have since updated their Djay and Vjay apps with 64-bit support. These apps now sports new features that are exclusive to the A7 processor.
A recent MacRumros report explains in details how the Algoriddim team went about implementing 64-bit support in their apps.
Macrumors:
For the realtime video-mixing app Vjay, the most processor-intensive task has always been decoding two videos simultaneously. For prior iPhones, the Algoriddim team needed to use a number of tricks and optimizations to get the process to work, and the resolution was degraded. With the iPhone 5s and the 64-bit A7 processor, decoding speed is twice as fast as before, and the iPhone 5s can process two full 720p HD video streams. The app can also export HD video over AirPlay in real time with zero latency.The new version of Djay now offers a new Harmonic Match feature that can analyze the musical key of a song in realtime and then transpose the key to ensure that transitions from one song to another match musically. This sort of realtime analysis and transposing simply wasn’t practical with prior iPhones, Algoriddim told MacRumors — analysis might take 10 to 15 seconds and the phone simply didn’t have the horsepower to do realtime transposing of keys without risking dropouts of audio.
In an interview with Macrumors, Algoriddim CEO Karim Morsy explained that the Djay and Vjay programming teams were able to 64-bit compatible versions of the apps just three days after the iPhone 5s went on sale largely because of Apple’s excellent developer tools.
According to Algoriddim CEO Karim Morsy (via Macrumors) The teams use a shared codebase between Algoriddim’s iOS and Mac apps, and code that had been written previously for the 64-bit versions of the Mac apps was able to be transitioned to iOS with a relatively minimal amount of effort.