When Apple unveiled the iPhone 5s back in 2013, it caused quite a stir because one of its key features was the A7 chipset used by Apple which was also the first 64-bit chipset to be used by a smartphone. After that announcement, OEMs started coming out and stating that they would soon start to incorporate 64-bit chipsets into their devices as well, and Samsung was one of them. Many had understandably expected Samsung to incorporate a 64-bit chipset into its Galaxy S5 but that did not turn out to be the case. Does that mean we can expect it in the Galaxy Note 4? Well that really remains to be seen, but if the benchmarks are thing to go by, it looks like Samsung’s first 64-bit smartphone could be a low-mid range device.
Ever since Apple introduced the industry’s first 64-bit processor with the iPhone 5s, silicon slingers have been in a state of emergency, or that’s at least what multiple accounts seem to suggest. While those initially attempted to laugh off 64-bit chips publicly, it eventually became obvious that, much like anything else in the industry, the rest must follow. You may call it herd mentality, but it probably has a lot more to do with pure business than anything else. Either ways, the current silicon king in the mobile space, Qualcomm, didn’t take long to announce it’s own plans to make the jump towards 64-bit processors, with processors like the Snapdragon 410, 610, 615, 808, and 815, all of which will be based on ARM’s new 64-bit architecture. And while chip development usually takes a long time (in smartphone years, that is), we’re already getting the first real hints that the first slew of devices powered by Qualcomm’s 64-bit chips are around the corner. More specifically, a recent run through the GFXBench benchmarking suite left traces of a Samsung device that was powered by a 64-bit Snapdragon 410 chip and an Adreno 306 GPU.
