Stefan Mileschin

Apple has just laid claim to a world first: 64-bit processing inside a real, ready-for-sale smartphone. The new A7 processor will power the iPhone 5S with a "desktop-class architecture" consisting of over 1 billion transistors. That's twice as many transistors as were squeezed into the A6 and, for the sake of context, it's not a million miles away from the 1.4 billion transistors found in a current Ivy Bridge desktop-class PC chip.

Largely as a result of this extra grunt, the A7 is claimed to be twice as fast as its predecessor, both in terms of CPU and graphics performance. iOS 7 will be 64-bit too, naturally, and Apple's own built-in apps will be "re-engineered" to exploit this next-gen processing capability, but the A7 and iPhone 5S will also be backwards compatible with existing 32-bit apps.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/10/a...&ncid=rss_semi