It's not really about the bits, but the new ARM-based processors will make a difference One of the biggest buzzwords of 2014 when it comes to mobile hardware is "64-bit." It gets thrown around like some sort of magic that makes everything about your smartphone or tablet better. It has to be better, because 64 is more than 32, right? The fact is, that while 64-bit processing has both advantages and drawbacks when used in something like a smartphone, the hardware that supports it can make a major difference because of other new manufacturing processes. While using these new chips is also a bit of future-proofing as Android itself and third-party software moves towards 64-bit, the tangible and more important changes come with the new ARMv8 chip architecture. There's plenty out there for folks who love to pore over white papers and look at diagrams and flowcharts, but for the rest of us — who really only care that these new 64-bit processors are better — things get more confusing. We love to get technical sometimes, but I think we can break things down for the folks who just want an overview without talking about registers and SMID and bandwidth. Let's do that.

For starters, we're talking about chips based on the new ARM AArch64 architecture. Other companies, like Intel, have developed their own 64-bit architecture for use in smartphones, but most companies will license ARM's spec for their chip design. Some, like NVIDIA or Qualcomm for example, will expand on ARM technology with some of their own IP to make their design even better. In any case, this new architecture, whether it's only the ARM spec or it includes other proprietary changes, will do two things — optimize for performance and use less battery to do the things we want our mobile devices to do. When you get to the nitty gritty, that's what all the latest advancement in mobile CPUs are about. We have more then enough raw power to do anything we need to do on a mobile device, so we need to optimize it and make it more battery friendly. New features are always great, and for sure we'll see them used in the near future, but what we want is for our phones and tablets do do things better and use less juice while doing them. new chips can do the things we want our mobile devices to do The thing is, it's not necessarily the move to a 64-bit architecture that allows for the improvements we want. Yes, 64-bit is a big part of the future of mobile hardware and applications, but with the majority of user-software still 32-bit, the new chip features aren't being used. In fact, these apps don't even "see" the new features because they weren't coded for any of them. And for heaven's sake — stop saying the big deal about 64-bit hardware is the ability to use more than 4GB of RAM. That's just one of the more minor features of the architecture, and pales when compared to things like the ability to fetch more data per cycle — which will allow for things like TouchWiz to be as "fast" as AOSP. For reals.

stop saying the big deal about 64-bit hardware is the ability to use more than 4GB of RAM The really big deal, which Alex and I wandered into in a recent episode of the Android Central Podcast, it the move to ARMv8 on these 64-bit chips. I reached out to NVIDIA — a company pretty familiar with 64-bit ARM processors and rumored to be the Android L launch partner — and this is what they had to say when I asked why the new 64-bit chips are important to Android: