iOS developers dish about new iPhone 5s hardware features
Announced at Tuesday’s Apple event, the iPhone 5s contains two big hardware improvements: a faster A7 processor with 64-bit architecture and a motion co-processor that gathers data from your device’s sensors.
While these under-the-hood features might not sound very fancy to the average consumer, they have iOS developers buzzing over potential implications. We queried several to see what they had to say about Apple’s impending hardware improvements.
iOS 7 goes 64-bit
Apple’s new A7 ARM chip powers the iPhone 5s; the company boasts that it’s not only twice as fast as the iPhone 5’s A6 chip, it offers just as good—if not better—battery life as the previous model. And that’s not all: The A7 is the first smartphone chip to feature 64-bit architecture. “I don’t think anybody was expecting [64-bit] so soon,” PCalc developer James Thompson told Macworld.
JavaScript and game developer Conrad Kreyling agrees with Thompson. “I assumed it was at least a year out, but it’s a welcome change. Apple isn’t ceding territory to Qualcomm or Samsung; it just leapfrogged the both of them.” Kreyling was surprised to see, however, that Apple chose to update to 64-bit architecture before increasing the processor core load. “I expected quad-core to be the big drop, not 64-bit, but perhaps we’ll see it in the next revision. Apple is still maintaining iOS on the single-core A4 found in the iPhone 4, which I’m sure is a large component in the decision-making process.”
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