iphone 5

For the real changes, you have to go under the surface. Inside, the iPhone 5S is a brand-new phone with a new System on a Chip (SoC), the Apple A7. As Apple announced, this is the first 64-bit consumer-based smartphone SoC.

So, what does that actually mean? Well, first and not so important at the moment, 64-bit chips can address more memory than 32-bit chips. Given the amount of RAM in smartphones now, this doesn't make much difference today, but it will do in the future. More importantly, moving to 64-bit means that the Apple can use a newer ARM architecture. This fully uses the capabilities of 64-bit, including larger and a larger number of general-purpose registers. General-purpose registers are where data is held for the processor to work on. Processors have to take data from memory and load it into a register, work on the data and then save it back to memory. As memory is slow, comparatively, having more and larger registers helps speed everything up, regardless of whether an application is 32-bit or 64-bit. Needless to say, iOS is still extremely smooth on this chip and you don't get slowdown or jerkiness that you sometimes still get with an Android device.