Arm is enthusiastic about Google’s announcement earlier this week encouraging Android applications to take advantage of the 64-bit Arm Architecture and making it a requirement for new app submissions to Google Play in August 2019. We believe this is a significant step for the Android ecosystem enabling more performance, better efficiency, and allowing for additional innovation for next generation mobile devices.
Arm is committed to the 64-bit architecture and future performance enhancements will increasingly be possible only in the 64-bit space. There is already a considerable performance advantage on some Arm CPUS for code running as 64-bit. We believe it is likely that more of our Android ecosystem partners will be helping developers meet these new requirements, providing resources and guidance. A great example of work already being done is detailed in this post from Unity Technologies geared at their mobile game developers.
For many applications, the production of the newly required 64-bit libraries will be simple, as many open-source libraries have been type-safe and tested for these systems for years. Most code written using Arm NEON intrinsics will compile for 64-bit without change and through the advances in compiler technology will produce better, more performant code automatically. For more details on porting considerations please see the Arm Community blog and accompanying documentation posted here: Porting to Arm 64-bit blog post on the Arm Community.
Keep an eye on the Arm Android Community for more details coming soon.