The PC industry has fully shifted to 64-bit, and the mobile field is also accelerating its transformation, from chip manufacturers to device manufacturers to application development, all of which are truly entering the 64-bit era.
In fact, as early as December 2017, Google issued a reminder to Android developers around the world for the first time to "turn to 64-bit applications", which became an important beginning of the full 64-bit of the entire Android ecosystem.
Starting August 1, 2019, the Google Play App Store requires all uploaded apps to have a 64-bit version.
Two years later, in August 2021, Google Play began to stop offering 32-bit apps to smart devices based on 64-bit hardware.
It is worth noting that the Android app store system in the Chinese mainland market is also collectively moving to 64-bit computing.
In April 2021, mainstream Android app stores such as Xiaomi App Store, OPPO Software Store, Vivo App Store, Tencent App Bao, and Baidu Mobile Assistant jointly announced the initiative to upgrade 64-bit applications in stages.
Since December last year, the mainstream app stores in the Chinese mainland market have no longer accepted pure 32-bit applications, while more and more mobile phones have opened up a "64-bit application area" and promoted the popularity of 64-bit applications by adding tags and providing 64-bit versions of replacement updates for 32-bit applications, and it is expected that there will be no need to worry about 64-bit compatibility issues next year.
Game engines such as Cocos2d-x, Unreal, and Unity are also gearing up for the 64-bit transition.
Driving 64-bit mobile computing, there are Google and many developers at the software application level, and ARM and many chip manufacturers at the hardware processor level.
ARM announced last year that from 2023, all Cortex-A series processor cores will only support 64-bit, both large and small.
According to ARM's observation of the mobile market, pure 32-bit application processors that do not currently support 64-bit applications have almost disappeared in the mobile market, and it is predicted that by the end of 2022, a new step will be reduced to less than 1%.
So, what are the benefits of 64-bit?
First, the 64-bit instruction set can significantly improve application lift (up to 20% in some workloads), hardware computing capabilities, and make the mobile experience faster and more responsive.
Second, 64-bit processors can handle larger amounts of data in memory, meeting the needs of new compute-intensive workloads, including AI, XR, HD mobile gaming, and more.
In addition, 64-bit architectures can also enhance the security of devices, including branch target recognition (BTI), pointer authentication (PAC), memory tag extension (MTE), etc., which are not built on 32-bit architectures.
As the number one brand in mobile processor shipments and as an ecological partner of Android and ARM, MediaTek is also vigorously promoting the ecological migration to 64-bit.
MediaTek said that the ARMv9 architecture focuses on 64-bit, which is also conducive to MediaTek to design a more efficient 5G smartphone SoC, and to obtain significant performance improvements in the current mainstream applications and games, unlocking new performance levels.
As early as 2014, when the Android system first began to release a 64-bit version, MediaTek launched a SoC product that supported 64-bit computing for the first time.
The flagship 5G mobile platform of Tianji 9000 released in 2021 has a new ARMv9 architecture, advanced 4nm process, and exclusive global energy efficiency optimization technology.
At the same time, MediaTek also announced a number of 32-bit and 64-bit application scenario comparison tests, confirming that 64-bit applications can indeed bring significant improvements to the user experience.
In terms of application launch speed, MediaTek Labs based on the Tianji 9000 mobile platform test results show that the cold start speed of 64-bit applications can be accelerated by less than 13% compared with 32-bit applications, more than 60%, of which a video application shortened from 1.983 seconds to 0.723 seconds, a full 63.5% faster.
In terms of game performance, the Unity Engine's ARMies Demo test results show that compiling a game into a 64-bit version can result in a 16% frame rate improvement compared to 32-bit.
In addition, results from ARM lab tests show that 64-bit computing on smartphones can deliver more than 90 percent performance gains when compressing files and nearly 80 percent faster when decompressing than 32-bit compute.
In terms of energy consumption, 13.2-35.2% energy efficiency improvement can also be obtained in the 64-bit computing environment, which means that the processor can complete the same computing task with less power, which is conducive to extending the battery life of the device.