The Nexus 5 was one of the best smartphone bargains we saw in 2013 and now Google might be planning to deliver a new budget smartphone that will be the best bargain yet.
G4Games has spotted a new report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily News that claims Google will use a MediaTek 64-bit processor for its upcoming budget Nexus smartphone, often referred to as the “Nexus 6.” The blog says that if the report is accurate, then the next-generation low-cost Nexus will either run a “quad-core MT6732 64-bit chip clocked at 1.5GHz, or the octa-core MT6752 SoC running at a frequency of 2.0GHz,” either of which would be an incredibly powerful processor for a supposed budget device.
For the uninitiated, chips with more bits can handle more memory, which means that a 32-bit chip is designed to handle memory addresses of up to 32 bits while a 64-bit chip is designed to handle memory addresses of up to 64 bits. This is going to become more important as smartphone hardware keeps improving and we eventually start to see devices with 4GB of RAM come to market.
Google is widely expected to add support for 64-bit chips with its next major release of Android later this year, although Intel has already modified the platform to give it a 64-bit kernel that will help it run on its own 64-bit chips.
Apple was the first big tech company to release a smartphone with a 64-bit processor when it launched the iPhone 5s last year.
