Last week Qualcomm’s Chief Marketing Officer Anand Chandrasekher caused a bit of a stir when he called Apple’s new 64-bit A7 processor a “marketing gimmick” in an interview with IDG news service. Specifically, his words were:
“I know there’s a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7. I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There’s zero benefit a consumer gets from that. Predominantly … you need it for memory addressability beyond 4GB [the iPhone 5s only has 1 GB of RAM]. 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.”
Chandrasekher’s comments, who previously ran Intel’s mobile platforms group, were quite shocking in that not only are they highly debatable, but that Qualcomm has a long history with Apple and supplies the modems used in the company’s iPhones and iPads. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, that’s why Qualcomm issued this statement to Macworld yesterday:
“The comments made by Anand Chandrasekher, Qualcomm CMO, about 64-bit computing were inaccurate. The mobile hardware and software ecosystem is already moving in the direction of 64-bit; and, the evolution to 64-bit brings desktop class capabilities and user experiences to mobile, as well as enabling mobile processors and software to run new classes of computing devices.”
Qualcomm did not provide further comment to Macworld and Apple has yet to issue any comments on the matter.
Qualcomm calls its ‘marketing gimmick’ comments about the A7 ‘inaccurate’ originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 09 Oct 2013 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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