Smartphone makers have a crazy knack of following the crowd. Even at times when it does not actually make the greatest sense. If a new technology is in, you can be sure that handset vendors will be on it.
Take 64-bit mobile processors, for instance.
This report says that we vendors have chosen the next year as the year of 64-bit processors. Chip makers like Qualcomm, Nvidia and Broadcom, all have changed their product roadmaps for next year in order to bring 64-bit mobile processors to market as soon as possible.
Obviously these CPUs and SoCs are one part of the puzzle — to what extent the mobile operating systems support this new technology remains to be seen.
Then again, that has rarely stopped smartphone makers from hyping up the possibilities. Case in point Android and dual-core. Samsung already brought to market the Galaxy S2 with a dual-core processors, well before Google actually added support for multi-core processors in Android.
And with the overly aggressive landscape of mobile phones, the marketing possibilities these 64-bit processors offer are hard to ignore.
There is a fair chance that we may get to see the first smartphones to pack support for such processors (this side of the iPhone 5S, of course) at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2014, though there is no official confirmation of this yet.
But if chipmakers start designing and unleashing their 64-bit solutions, wide acceptance is not all that far off. Microsoft and Nokia are sure to be gauging the possibilities for Windows Phone, once these chips get ready for prime time, this much is a given.
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Phones won’t really be able to make complete use of 64-Bit, but I guess keeping up with the Joneses is the only way these companies can sell products