will 128 bit be a thing?

[ManWithBeard1990]

Im not sure if it's even possible. How I had 64 bit explained to me is that it has to do witht he frequency wave of how information is sent. 32 bit is only sending information on the crest, and 64 bit is sending information on  crest and trough. So unless we are able to find a way to send information on the crest, trough and consistently in between, no.

 

Im not sure. I dont really trust that the guy who taught me this was right or wrong.

No mate, that's not 64 bit. That's how DDR works though.

[Guest]

Would there be a reason to have it? Until we need terabytes of RAM, 64-bit seems pretty appropriate. (Of course, it has other things than supporting more RAM, but those don't really need to be improved upon).

[ForsakenLive]

I think you mean 'frequency'...

was just quoting OP.

[DigitalHermit]

was just quoting OP.

 

My apologies then...

 

On another note, I think servers/data centers would be the first to get mass-produced 128-bit stuff... It'll be a long time from now though...

[ForsakenLive]

My apologies then...

 

On another note, I think servers/data centers would be the first to get mass-produced 128-bit stuff... It'll be a long time from now though...

Yup, Oracle is the guy there, they have insanely crazy CPUs. They cost tons of money.

[LAwLz]

I have never said what you claim.

Bit limitation was NEVER an issue with smartphone performance app. And most smartphone don't have 4GB of RAM, they are still on 512MB, 1GB, 2 or 3GB at best.

The iPhone using a 64-bit CPU has only 1GB of RAM.

One day, 64-bit CPU on smartphone, like on desktop will get a performance boost. Maybe the days where we will have those smartphone, that can be a desktop replacement, or laptop in some fashion, but that actually works well. Or if smartphone gaming evolves the way Nvidia tries to do. But so far, that is not the case, and 64-bit CPU is used for marketing purposes.

I guess if you have a specific custom app that is very demanding and you need any bit of power you have, but for the massive majority of people, its not needed.

Sure current 64-bit CPUs on smartphone are faster... the CPU itself is faster. Obviously!

You were implying that the move to 64bit on phones is just marketing and completely useless when in reality it is a huge step forward in terms of performance.

Sure right now the additional addressing space is not needed, but the wider registers (not just wider, but also more of them) will help with performance. There are a ton of other improvements in ARMv8 as well.

 

We are already seeing a big performance boost (between 10-20%) by switching to 64bit. If you take an iOS app and compile it for A32 and then take the same program and compile it for A64, you will get about a 20% performance increase, even if you run them on the same processor. You can see this in Geekbench 3. No tests other than the memory test was changed to support 64bit, but we still see a big performance increase in all tests (except for the Dijkstra test since is very pointer heavy). This is what we are already seeing, not what we will see in the future. So simply recompiling (which on Android will be done every time you update the OS or install an app if you're using ART) your app for 64bit can give a 10-20% performance increase, no matter which CPU you use (as long as it supports the ARM 64bit instructions).

 

It will also help a lot with IPv6 since the header is 64bit aligned. On mobile devices which sends and receives a lot of IP packets that can accumulate to quite a lot of power saved.

 

And in addition to all this, mobile devices relies quite heavily on race-to-idle, which means that the faster a task is finished, the faster the device will go into a deeper sleep state and save power. So the move to 64bit and the performance improvements it gives can result in longer battery life. Something I think we all will appreciate.

 

 

64bit on mobile is a far greater improvement than what we saw on x86. You can't compare the two.

[LAwLz]

Would there be a reason to have it? Until we need terabytes of RAM, 64-bit seems pretty appropriate. (Of course, it has other things than supporting more RAM, but those don't really need to be improved upon).

x86_64 can't address 64bits of memory because some bits are ignored, some addresses are reserved etc. With all that taken into consideration we end up being able to address 256TB of RAM on x86_64 (from what I've heard, I am not 100% sure).

256TB sounds like a lot, but if we assume that the price of RAM halves each year (which is only slightly more than what it has historically done) then we will have 256TB of RAM in just over 20 years or so. Even if we assume that prices won't drop every year we still end up at hundreds of TB of RAM in 30 or 40 years. By that time, we probably need to have moved to 128bit.

[cubercaleb]

unlikely soon

from reddit:

"Say you have a bucket and a wheelbarrow. A lot of the things you deal with on a daily basis fit just fine in a bucket. But when you start wanting to carry multiple things, especially multiple big things, sometimes you run out of room. Sure you could carefully balance things on top of the bucket, but that requires extra work. But so instead you switch to sticking things in your wheelbarrow, bigger, more roomy, but you also need more effort to push it around. Since enough people like carrying enough stuff around with them most of us switched to using wheelbarrows cause we kept running out of space in our buckets. If you walk the same speed pushing your wheelbarrow full of stuff as you used to carrying your bucket, you'd be moving more stuff around.

In this analogy, the bucket represents 32bit, the wheelbarrow represents the slight extra cost of the larger address space of 64bit. The things you put in your bucket or wheelbarrow are apps, programs and processes.

Moving to 128bit would be like using a giant giant barge or something huge like that. Sure you could fit tons and tons of stuff in it, but it takes more effort to move around and most people don't need that much room."

 

Actually, I would argue that 64 bit is like a barge, since 32bit is 2^32 bytes of data (4 Gigabytes) and 64bit is 2^64 bytes of data (16 Exabytes). As bit count doubles the available memory address get exponentially larger.

 

8bit - 256 Bytes 

16bit - 64 Kilobytes (~65 thousand bytes)

32bit - 4 Gigabytes (~4 billion bytes)

64bit - 16 Exabytes (~18 quintillion bytes)

128bit - 281,474,976,710,656 Yottabytes (~340 undecillion bytes) 

256bit - I won't even bother with this one

 

Based of this information we will never need anything beyond 64bit for an extremely long time, Definitely not in the life times of anyone currently on this forum.

[cubercaleb]

considering 128bit is exponentially larger than 64, I don't see it becoming a thing anytime soon when 64bit is currently overkill for everything atm.

 

EDIT: the bucket to wheel barrel analogy is not totally accurate. its more like a shot glass vs a dump truck, when comparing 32 to 64 bit.

Nahhh, more like pipet and the a massive landfill, or a football field, or something huge.

[cubercaleb]

Would there be a reason to have it? Until we need terabytes of RAM, 64-bit seems pretty appropriate. (Of course, it has other things than supporting more RAM, but those don't really need to be improved upon).

 

You mean 16 Exabytes of RAM, not terrabytes.

[Guest]

You mean 16 Exabytes of RAM, not terrabytes.

Whoops, I always thought it could address only up to ~2TB of RAM... I guess I need to do some research!

 

But still, we should be good for a few years

[GoodBytes]

You were implying that the move to 64bit on phones is just marketing and completely useless when in reality it is a huge step forward in terms of performance.

Sure right now the additional addressing space is not needed, but the wider registers (not just wider, but also more of them) will help with performance. There are a ton of other improvements in ARMv8 as well.

 

We are already seeing a big performance boost (between 10-20%) by switching to 64bit. If you take an iOS app and compile it for A32 and then take the same program and compile it for A64, you will get about a 20% performance increase, even if you run them on the same processor. You can see this in Geekbench 3. No tests other than the memory test was changed to support 64bit, but we still see a big performance increase in all tests (except for the Dijkstra test since is very pointer heavy). This is what we are already seeing, not what we will see in the future. So simply recompiling (which on Android will be done every time you update the OS or install an app if you're using ART) your app for 64bit can give a 10-20% performance increase, no matter which CPU you use (as long as it supports the ARM 64bit instructions).

 

It will also help a lot with IPv6 since the header is 64bit aligned. On mobile devices which sends and receives a lot of IP packets that can accumulate to quite a lot of power saved.

 

And in addition to all this, mobile devices relies quite heavily on race-to-idle, which means that the faster a task is finished, the faster the device will go into a deeper sleep state and save power. So the move to 64bit and the performance improvements it gives can result in longer battery life. Something I think we all will appreciate.

 

 

64bit on mobile is a far greater improvement than what we saw on x86. You can't compare the two.

I can't wait to see how Facebook app, Instagram, and all that will now be soo much faster thanks to 64-bit CPUs.

These are super demanding software. It will change your world! And let's not even talk about phone calls. Now the delay in a conversation would be so much reduced

[LAwLz]

I can't wait to see how Facebook app, Instagram, and all that will now be soo much faster thanks to 64-bit CPUs.

These are super demanding software. It will change your world! And let's not even talk about phone calls. Now the delay in a conversation would be so much reduced

"Baww I don't want a free 20% performance increase!"

 

That's what you sound like. Like I said, it also gives longer battery life thanks to race-to-idle. Also, there are quite demanding tasks on phones and tablets. I regularly see my CPU usage go to 100% on one or multiple cores. My video player, my browser, camera post processing, launching apps (although that will be fixed with ART), hell even the keyboard can become quite demanding once you adding a lot of languages.

 

Stop backpedaling please. You went from "it's completely useless and just marketing" to "w-w-well I don't need the performance anyway".

[GoodBytes]

These are just the CPU getting better. NOT because its 64-bit. That is what you don't get.

[Clyne]

Somewhere in the future, there will be 128 bit i think.

[TheProfosist]

Well since most things STILL AREN'T 64bit in the consumer space I'd have to say that it isn't coming any time soon.

[ManWithBeard1990]

I think they could have done the wider registers with 32 bits if they wanted to. Of course, marketing-wise you can't really say "well, the new 64-bit processor in the iPad will work with 4 or more GB of memory but is otherwise similar in performance to the one we had before. Also, we'll only be using a gigabyte of ram for now so it doesn't really matter." The new 64bit thing is faster because of the added instructions, not necessarily just because it's 64 bit. The extra stuff might be part of the extension of the instruction set that enables 64bit, but not an improvement that inherently requires the extra address space.

[LAwLz]

These are just the CPU getting better. NOT because its 64-bit. That is what you don't get.

No, it's not just CPUs getting better. If it was then how do you explain the performance increase when simply recompiling it it for A64 and running it on the same CPU?

Again, on the same CPU we get a 10-20% performance increase. It's not "the A7 performs 20% better than the A6, it must be because it's 64bit!". This is "the A7 performs 20% better when it runs 64bit apps compared to 32bit apps".

 

 

I think they could have done the wider registers with 32 bits if they wanted to. Of course, marketing-wise you can't really say "well, the new 64-bit processor in the iPad will work with 4 or more GB of memory but is otherwise similar in performance to the one we had before. Also, we'll only be using a gigabyte of ram for now so it doesn't really matter." The new 64bit thing is faster because of the added instructions, not necessarily just because it's 64 bit. The extra stuff might be part of the extension of the instruction set that enables 64bit, but not an improvement that inherently requires the extra address space.

The wider registers are part of the move to 64bit. 64 bits of virtual memory addressing is only 1 part of what is classified as a "64bit computer". Without the other improvements it would not be classified as 64bit. It would be 32bit with some 64bit parts.

[GoodBytes]

No, it's not just CPUs getting better. If it was then how do you explain the performance increase when simply recompiling it it for A64 and running it on the same CPU?

Again, on the same CPU we get a 10-20% performance increase. It's not "the A7 performs 20% better than the A6, it must be because it's 64bit!". This is "the A7 performs 20% better when it runs 64bit apps compared to 32bit apps".

Because the benchmark software pushes the CPU. Facebook apps and angry bird, doesn't. Most apps on cellphones assumes the lowest common denominator, and are simple in design. Let's say you have a software that is a clock. There is just so much you can do, to make it more demanding by making it fancy.

[cubercaleb]

No, it's not just CPUs getting better. If it was then how do you explain the performance increase when simply recompiling it it for A64 and running it on the same CPU?

Again, on the same CPU we get a 10-20% performance increase. It's not "the A7 performs 20% better than the A6, it must be because it's 64bit!". This is "the A7 performs 20% better when it runs 64bit apps compared to 32bit apps".

 

Well thats because applications on mobile are pretty sucky in terms in how efficient they are. Also, why the heck to a need apps like facebook and instagram to run 20% faster, 64bit arm based cpu's might be more efficient but it just seems like Apple used it for marketing more than anything Especially since iPhone users are usually just use instagram, facebook, twitter, snapchat and other basic apps, as opposed to the "professional" and more demanding apps that are available on the iPad.

[GoodBytes]

Well thats because applications on mobile are pretty sucky in terms in how efficient they are. Also, why the heck to a need apps like facebook and instagram to run 20% faster, 64bit arm based cpu's might be more efficient but it just seems like Apple used it for marketing more than anything Especially since iPhone users are usually just use instagram, facebook, twitter, snapchat and other basic apps, as opposed to the "professional" and more demanding apps that are available on the iPad.

I would agree with LAwLz if it is presented as: Oh hey this CPU is the new A7 chip 64-bit 1.3GHz. And not: 64-bit!!!! SUPER COMPUTER in your palm of your hand! With 64-bit your phone is now SUPER CHARGED! 1 billion times faster! W000oooooOOOWWW! 64-bit! DO THE MATH! Why is the phone so great, you ask? 64-BIt M**f**k !!!!!! Don't settle for less! Get 64-bit!. In your face marketing. Something that I would not mind, if 32-bit instruction would have been limited, and just now a 64-bit came out to solve this massive problem.

[locoperson11]

There are already 512bit processors to accelerate super computers, it's just going to take a while for them to be useful for anything else

[LAwLz]

Because the benchmark software pushes the CPU. Facebook apps and angry bird, doesn't. Most apps on cellphones assumes the lowest common denominator, and are simple in design. Let's say you have a software that is a clock. There is just so much you can do, to make it more demanding by making it fancy.

Well thats because applications on mobile are pretty sucky in terms in how efficient they are. Also, why the heck to a need apps like facebook and instagram to run 20% faster

And we're back to the "I don't want higher performance" argument. You know people said the same about desktops when we started getting 1GHz single core chips, right? That's how foolish you are right now. The question isn't why you would want 20% higher performance. The question is why wouldn't you want 20% higher performance, especially if it can also increase battery life? Why turn down longer battery life, higher performance and future proofing (the sooner we get 64bit the sooner it will be adopted by programs, so that we don't end up in the mess Windows is stuck in)? It makes absolutely no sense.

Also, like I said before I often see one or more CPU cores spike up to 100% usage on my phone and tablet. It's far more common than you might think. The reason is that it tries to race to idle as much as possible. It's better to do as much work as possible in a short burst, than to keep the cores plugged in for a long period of time.

 

Here are some of the programs that could benefit from a faster CPU on my phone, as of today:

• Camera apps - Not just for things like recording + taking photo at the same time but also things like post processing (Google camera's lens blur effect is really processor intense, and so is the panorama stitching).

   

• Web browser - This is everything from JS to image rendering, CSS etc.

   

• Encryption - VPN, SSH and full device encryption. If we are moving towards finger print and iris scanning then that will be included too. ARMv8 runs circles around ARMv7 when it comes to crypto stuff thanks to the new crypto instructions.

   

• Google Play - My guess is that all the thumbnails that need to be generated are to blame

   

• Google Maps - it doesn't drop frames but you can clearly tell that it is working on resizing things, figuring out what to fetch etc when you move around fast and/or zoom in/out

   

• Compressing/decompressing archives - self explanatory

   

• The keyboard - It is fairly slow sometimes when I got many languages added (spell checking checks all currently selected languages, not just the one for your keyboard). It doesn't make the CPU reach 100%, but it is clear that better hardware would make it smoother (it's sometimes really slow, and sometimes even freezes completely for a while. Removing some languages fixes it)

   

• My video player (MX Player) - I still can't play 1080p Hi10p video with styled subtitles. Hell some releases I got make even some older desktops struggle.

   

• Games - Pretty self explanatory. I like emulators and they can be pretty demanding.

 

and that's without including things like just better performance in general. The device being more responsive, getting better battery life, faster app launch time (because Dalvik is ass and needs to compile the program every single time you launch it) and so on.

[DevanArianne]

No mate, that's not 64 bit. That's how DDR works though.

Maybe 64bit and 32 bit would make a good As Fast As Possible.

[cubercaleb]

And we're back to the "I don't want higher performance" argument. You know people said the same about desktops when we started getting 1GHz single core chips, right? That's how foolish you are right now. The question isn't why you would want 20% higher performance. The question is why wouldn't you want 20% higher performance, especially if it can also increase battery life? Why turn down longer battery life, higher performance and future proofing (the sooner we get 64bit the sooner it will be adopted by programs, so that we don't end up in the mess Windows is stuck in)? It makes absolutely no sense.

Also, like I said before I often see one or more CPU cores spike up to 100% usage on my phone and tablet. It's far more common than you might think. The reason is that it tries to race to idle as much as possible. It's better to do as much work as possible in a short burst, than to keep the cores plugged in for a long period of time.

 

Here are some of the programs that could benefit from a faster CPU on my phone, as of today:

• Camera apps - Not just for things like recording + taking photo at the same time but also things like post processing (Google camera's lens blur effect is really processor intense, and so is the panorama stitching).

   

• Web browser - This is everything from JS to image rendering, CSS etc.

   

• Encryption - VPN, SSH and full device encryption. If we are moving towards finger print and iris scanning then that will be included too. ARMv8 runs circles around ARMv7 when it comes to crypto stuff thanks to the new crypto instructions.

   

• Google Play - My guess is that all the thumbnails that need to be generated are to blame

   

• Google Maps - it doesn't drop frames but you can clearly tell that it is working on resizing things, figuring out what to fetch etc when you move around fast and/or zoom in/out

   

• Compressing/decompressing archives - self explanatory

   

• The keyboard - It is fairly slow sometimes when I got many languages added (spell checking checks all currently selected languages, not just the one for your keyboard). It doesn't make the CPU reach 100%, but it is clear that better hardware would make it smoother (it's sometimes really slow, and sometimes even freezes completely for a while. Removing some languages fixes it)

   

• My video player (MX Player) - I still can't play 1080p Hi10p video with styled subtitles. Hell some releases I got make even some older desktops struggle.

   

• Games - Pretty self explanatory. I like emulators and they can be pretty demanding.

 

and that's without including things like just better performance in general. The device being more responsive, getting better battery life, faster app launch time (because Dalvik is ass and needs to compile the program every single time you launch it) and so on.

 

I wasn't trying to say 64bit is useless, I was trying to say that Apple used it as a marketing gimmick more than anything else. On an iPad this would be useful, but right now I don't see it making a huge difference on the iPhone considering there are not a whole lot of professional apps on the iPhone, again a device targeted to 13 year old kids with "swag". Keep in mind, the average consumer that buys Apples stuff doesn't care for performance, it's only the power users.