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Old 09-17-2013, 10:57 PM   #287
Rathji
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Quote:
Originally Posted by photon View Post
Currently a developer has to choose, if they only want to support iOS7 they can compile and submit a combo 32/64 bit version of their app that'll run on any iOS7 device, but not on iOS6. If they want to support previous versions of iOS they have to stay purely 32 bit.

But next month Apple will update (presumably to Xcode) so that developers can release a unified binary that'll support 32 bit or 64 bit if it's available regardless of OS version.

Unless it's something very specific, I doubt the 32->64 bit update would have a significant impact on most apps as far as performance goes, it's just so the OS can efficiently address more than 4GB of RAM. Though I guess bigger registers might make video encoding/decoding faster, so maybe a little benefit.
I doubt that is the case, since there are no phones that have that much RAM and likely won't for the next few years.

64 bit is better for complex calculations involved in graphics processing, which is the big draw here, I think. Also useful for complex crypto etc, but I doubt that is the major reason behind it.

I heard/read that it took a developer a couple hours to migrate his code to 64 bit, so they have made it pretty easy. I don't anticipate any big hurdles for devs on this front.
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