A funny thing happened recently. A Korean pop music star forced a silicon valley giant to upgrade its computer systems. When Psy's "Gangnam Style" reached over 2 billion views on Google's YouTube, the company realised its hit counter would break because it is based on a 32 bit system unable to count past 2,147,483,647. Because of this - the story goes - Google was forced to upgrade the YouTube counter to a 64 bit system.
The 64 bit system architecture has been around for years, and it has slowly been creeping into all aspects of computing. Smartphones - due to their relatively diminutive requirements have so far stuck mostly to 32 bit systems - apart from a few high-end models, but a recent announcement by Apple to third-party developers is set to take the prevalence of 64 bit mobile processing to the next level.
Apple announced that from February 2015 it will only accept new apps compiled for the 64 bit architecture, while updates to existing apps must be 64-bit capable from June 2015.
