Starting this month, China's mobile computing ecosystem began to make great strides toward 64-bit migration.
According to the @Mobile Intelligent Terminal Ecosystem Alliance, from April 2022, OPPO, vivo, and Xiaomi's app stores will not allow 32-bit apps to be listed separately, and game apps will not be restricted.
This means that subsequent developers face two choices when developing applications: either develop pure 64-bit applications, or upload them in a compatible or dual-package mode. A separate 32-bit app, you should not see in the mainstream app store in the future.
As early as December 2017, Google issued a reminder to Android developers around the world for the first time to "move to 64-bit applications", which became an important beginning for the entire Android ecosystem to comprehensively 64-bit. Starting August 1, 2019, the Google Play Store requires that all uploaded apps must have a 64-bit version. Two years later, in August 2021, Google Play stopped offering 32-bit apps to 64-bit hardware-based devices.
The main reason for the full promotion of 64-bit applications is that compared to 32-bit, it can significantly improve application performance (up to 20% in some workloads), hardware computing capabilities. At the same time, 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.
According to reports, the results of Arm lab tests show that compared with 32-bit computing, 64-bit computing on smartphones can bring more than 90% performance improvement when compressing files, and can increase decompression speed by nearly 80%. In terms of energy consumption, 64-bit applications have better power performance than 32-bit. Compared with 32-bit computing environments, mainstream mobile processor architectures can achieve 13.2% to 35.2% energy efficiency improvements in 64-bit computing environments, which means that processors can complete the same computing tasks with less power.
Because 64-bit applications have these inherent advantages, they are actively promoting support for 64-bit applications, including Android and ARM. ARM announced last year that from 2023, all Cortex-A series processor cores will only support 64-bit, both large and small.
In the core architecture of the flagship processor Snapdragon 8 and Tianji 9000 that use ARM's new architecture on the market this year, the super core Cortex-X2 and the small core Cortex-A510 only support 64 bits, and only the large core Cortex-A710 is compatible with 32-bit applications.
This means that if you run 32-bit applications on these flagship processors, you can only run the A710 large core. Neither can the performance of the X2 supercore be used, nor can it use an energy-efficient core like the A510 in some low-load scenarios.
At present, the domestic application environment is more complex, each mobile phone manufacturer has its own application store, as well as third-party application channels including application treasure and Cool An. Therefore, in the promotion and popularization of 64-bit applications, the domestic market has always been more difficult than other markets.
After the joint announcement of OPPO, vivo and xiaomi, it will greatly promote the popularity of 64-bit applications. After all, these three companies occupy the scale of hundreds of millions of users in China. Interestingly, though, Huawei is not on the league's list.
However, Huawei is not lagging behind in the promotion of 64-bit applications, according to the previous document information, from February 1, 2022, the new listing/upgraded applications in the application market will be upgraded to 64-bit.
32-bit applications, it is indeed time to withdraw from the stage of history!