On the afternoon of April 6, several major mobile phone manufacturers OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi of the ITGSA Mobile Intelligent Terminal Ecosystem Alliance jointly announced that from April 2022, new applications on the OPPO, vivo, and Xiaomi app stores will not be allowed to be listed separately for 32-bit application packages, and can support compatible or dual-package uploads; Game apps are temporarily unrestricted.
There may be many domestic mobile phone users who have recently used the app store to download the app, and have noticed that many apps are marked as "64-bit". In addition, during the process of downloading and installing these 64-bit applications, you may also see a prompt that "running 64-bit applications can fully utilize the native performance". So many netizens are curious: what is the difference between 64-bit applications and 32-bit applications in the past?
To explain this problem, it involves some more complex technical principles. In simple terms, 64-bit applications can support longer combinatorial calculation commands (up to 64-bit 0/1). So when implementing some functions, 64-bit applications consume fewer resources and theoretically run faster.
The main reason is that the mobile phone processor is basically based on the ARM architecture. The ARM V7 instruction set used by 32-bit application code is 17 years ago, and the ARM V8 instruction set used by 64-bit application code is actually a product of 10 years ago. So with the continuous upgrading of the ARM architecture, the new processor architecture has gradually become incompatible with the overly old 32-bit instruction set.
Taking the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor launched by Qualcomm this year and the Tianji 9000 processor launched by MediaTek as an example, they both use ARM's latest generation of Cortex-X2 super core, Cortex-A710 large core and Cortex-A510 small core architecture, and the performance has been significantly improved compared with the previous generation of processors. However, both the Cortex-X2 Super Core and the Cortex-A510 Small Core only support the ARM V9 instruction set and are compatible with the ARM V8 instruction set at most, so both cores can only run 64-bit applications.
So if you use a 32-bit application on a phone equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or a Tianji 9000 processor, it can only run on the big core of the Cortex-A710. But in fact, many simple applications running on the Cortex-A510 small core are completely sufficient. Leveraging the Cortex-A710 large core to run these 32-bit applications is simply "overkill". In addition, the power consumption of the Cortex-A710 large core is higher than that of the Cortex-A510 small core, so some mobile phones equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or Tianji 9000 processors will have excess power consumption if they use 32-bit applications for a long time, and the battery life under the same battery capacity may not be as good as the old mobile phone.
In addition, because 32-bit applications are not optimized for these new processors, the execution efficiency of these applications will be greatly reduced when running on new mobile phones, not only can not play the hardware advantages of new mobile phones, but also may also have problems such as stuttering to reduce user experience.
In fact, Apple has completely eliminated 32-bit applications as early as the iOS 11 era, and now the new Apple phones are running 64-bit applications, which is one of the reasons why iPhones are smoother than Android phones. OPPO, vivo, millet and other domestic manufacturers have not started to solve this problem until today, which can be said to have left enough time for application developers to prepare.
In general, the new regulations of OPPO, vivo and xiaomi are mainly aimed at application developers, with the purpose of hoping that mainstream mobile applications can keep up with the upgrade of mobile hardware and bring better user experience. For the average user, the most obvious change in the use of 64-bit applications is that the daily heat problem of the mobile phone may be significantly reduced (except for playing games), and the battery life will be extended. The phenomenon of application stuttering and flashback will also become less. And because the Android system is relatively open, even if some of the older 32-bit applications can not be listed in the app store because of the lack of developer maintenance, users can also choose to download APK files to manually install these 32-bit applications, so the new regulations of mobile phone manufacturers have basically no impact on daily use.