Qualcomm VP: Apple A7 chip is a marketing gimmick

One of the major features of the recently announced Apple iPhone 5s is the company's own A7 chip and its 64-bit nature. However, according to Qualcomm's senior vice president and head of marketing Anand Chandrasekher, the 64-bit architecture of the A7 chip is a "marketing gimmick."

"I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There’s zero benefit a consumer gets from that," states Chandrasekher. He acknowledges that the 64-bit processor enables the use of more than 4GB of RAM, but this isn't relevant in the iPhone 5s' case.

As a result, consumers get "zero benefit" from the 64-bit A7 chip. It's the OS developers, who are going to require the 64-bit feature at some point in time, according to Chandrasekher.

Gimmick or not, the Apple A7 chip proved itself to be quite potent when we put it through its paces in our benchmark tests. Check out our Apple iPhone 5s review to see just how fast it is and how it fares against the competition.

The exec revealed that Qualcomm is also working to release a 64-bit mobile processor, as it makes sense from an "engineering efficiency standpoint." He didn't specify an exact timeframe on when those chips will make it to the market.

The shots fired from Qualcomm are reminiscent of how Samsung and Nvidia reacted back in 2012, when Apple announced their A5X chip at the then new iPad announcement event. Nvidia was unhappy with Apple's allegedly untrue statement that its quad-core GPU is faster than Nvidia's ultra-low voltage GeForce GPU found in the Tegra 3.

Source | Via