ARM reportedly working with Samsung on 64-bit mobile chip

While it's no secret that Samsung has been working on its own 64-bit mobile chip to rival Apple's A7, the Korean company has been a bit quiet on its development. According to Unwired View, a senor ARM official has confirmed to the Korea Herald that the company is working with Samsung on a 64-bit chip. The new chip, undoubtedly part of the Exynos line-up, will be making it into next year's Galaxy S5.

If 64-bits just aren't enough for you, the ARM official has also revealed that it is aiming for 128-bit mobile chips that will be developed over the next couple of years. As ridiculous as it may sound, demand for the chip will supposedly be driven by the drastic performance upgrades needed for biometric sensors and face recognition.

The next S or Note smartphone might sport the 64-bit chip

While Samsung is set on making its own competitor chip to Apple's A7, Qualcomm doesn't seem to be convinced. Back in October, Qualcomm's Anand Chandrasekher had called the 64-bit chip a 'marketing gimmick' which might not amount to any immediate benefits for smartphone users. According to him, “I know there’s a lot of noise because Apple put a 64-bit chip on their A7. I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There’s zero benefit a consumer gets from that.”

The executive, rationalising his argument, said that the benefit of having a 64-bit chip is having more memory addressability, but that does not really help today’s smartphones or tablets, including the iPhone 5s, which comes with 1GB of RAM. While talking about this, Chandrasekher said, “Predominantly, you need it from memory addressability beyond 4GB. That’s it. You don’t really need it for performance, and the kinds of applications that 64-bit get used in mostly are large, server-class applications.”