From TechHive:

“I know there’s a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7,” said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Qualcomm, in an interview. “I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There’s zero benefit a consumer gets from that.”

A benefit of 64-bit is more memory addressability, but that is not relevant in today’s smartphones or tablets, Chandrasekher said. The iPhone 5s has only 1GB of DRAM.

“Predominantly… you need it for 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,” said Chandrasekher, who previously ran Intel’s mobile platforms group.

Translation: we don’t have a 64-bit chip yet so 64-bit is nothing special. Ask us again when we release our own 64-bit mobile chip.

Why are we even listening to the Chief Marketing Officer when it comes to something as technical as chip architecture? Of course he’s going to spin it to make his company look the best, and downplay the competition.

The chip maker ultimately will deliver a 64-bit mobile chip, but sees the move as more beneficial from engineering, chip design and OSes standpoints.

“From an engineering efficiency standpoint it just makes sense to go do that. Particularly the OS guys will want it at some point in time,” said Chandrasekher, who declined to say when the its 64-bit chip would be introduced.

Consumers and tablet and smartphone makers won’t drive the demand for 64-bit chips, Chandrasekher said.

Translation: the consumer gets no benefit from 64-bit, except more efficient systems and an improved OS. Got it.

I also liked this bit (emphasis mine): “Consumers and tablet and smartphone makers won’t drive the demand for 64-bit chips.” So tablet and smartphone makes won’t drive the demand for 64-bit chips, the OS guys will. I wonder if there are any companies out there that develop an OS to run on the hardware they also developed?