Shipments of 64-bit mobile processors will exceed 182 million in 2014, of which 20 percent will power Android devices, said ABI Research.
Apple managed to power more than 36 million iPhones and iPads with Apple’s A7, the first 64-bit mobile processor.
Rivals of Apple have already joined the league of 64-bit mobile processor. During the Mobile World Congress 2014, Intel, Marvell, MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Nvidia all announced their first 64-bit mobile processors.
At the Mobile World Congress 2014, Qualcomm said the Snapdragon 615 chipset is the mobile industry’s first commercially announced octa-core solution with integrated LTE and 64-bit capabilities, while the Snapdragon 610 chipset supports LTE and 64-bit capabilities using quad-core processing.
Murthy Renduchintala, executive vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, said: “64-bit processing capabilities are now an industry requirement for this tier, and we are meeting our customers’ needs with both octa- and quad-core configurations.”
ABI Research says 64-bit-compliant smartphones are unlikely to hit the market before the release of the next Android update, expected in the second half of the year.
The majority of 64-bit mobile chips announced so far are targeted at the mid-range of the Android market and not the high-end part of it.
“A number of early adopters will use 64-bit as a catchy marketing strategy to easily communicate differentiation using more-is-better adage previously used for promoting performance in the multi-core processor race,” said Malik Saadi, practice director at ABI Research.
By 2018 shipments of 64-bit processors targeting smartphones and tablets will exceed 1.12 billion units, representing 55 percent of the total market.
Android devices will be leading consumption of these chips with 60 percent market share, followed by Apple’s iOS with 30 percent and Microsoft Windows in the third position with less than 9 percent market share, ABI Research said.
ARM will be the dominant instruction set for 64-bit mobile processing over the forecast period but will gradually lose market share to x86 architecture, which will grasp about 10 percent share of the total market by 2018.
