Apple is a company that very rarely does anything “first”, instead opting to wait for technology to mature before using it in their products. That changed with the retina screen in the iPhone 4, but more recently it changed with the introduction of the 64-bit Apple A7 chip in the iPhone 5s. For a company who rarely talks about specs to spend a good portion of their product launch talking about transistor counts says a lot.

Enter Samsung, who was quick to throw up a defense saying 64-bit chips were an inevitability and that they were already hard at work on their own 64-bit chip. Over the weekend, we found out even more news about Samsung’s efforts to out-spec Apple. According to a “Samsung Official” that spoke to the Korean publication Daum, the company is in “the final stages” of making a 64-bit processor and that Android will become 64-bit compatible early next year. If you read between the lines, this means the Galaxy S5 might be a 64-bit phone.

Why should you even care about 64-bit? If you listen to Samsung, it’s purely about the RAM. They want to make a phone with 4 GB of RAM next year, as crazy as that sounds, and that’s the key selling point of a 64-bit instruction set to them.

The funny thing is that the iPhone 5s only has 1 GB of RAM. Apple put a 64-bit chip in that thing because of the architectural improvements that came with the newer ARMv8 instruction set, not for the increased address space.

I’m curious to see how Google spins 64-bit, because in my honest opinion, Apple failed to convince people why they should care about 64-bit versus 32-bit.