After Criticizing Apple’s 64-bit A7, Qualcomm Executive Reassigned

Apple-A7

Former chief marketing officer at Qualcomm, Anand Chandrasekher, has been reassigned to a new position after making negative comments about Apple’s 64-bit A7 chip.

According to a statement Qualcomm sent to CNET:

Anand Chandrasekher, is moving to a new role leading our exploration of certain enterprise related initiatives…Anand will continue to report to Steve Mollenkopf, COO and President of Qualcomm. This will be effective immediately.

He has also been removed from the Qualcomm leadership page.

Earlier this month, Chandrasekher said that Apple’s 64-bit A7 chip is a “gimmick”. He told IDG News Services that:

I know there’s a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7. I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There’s zero benefit a consumer gets from that.

Qualcomm later said that the statements made by Chandrasekher were inaccurate, essentially retracting the statement. Qualcomm contacted us and said:

The comments made by Anand Chandrasekher, Qualcomm CMO, about 64-bit computing were inaccurate. The mobile hardware and software ecosystem is already moving in the direction of 64-bit; and, the evolution to 64-bit brings desktop class capabilities and user experiences to mobile, as well as enabling mobile processors and software to run new classes of computing devices.

Chandrasekher may have put Qualcomm in a difficult position as Apple is already working on its second-generation 64-bit A8 chip and Samsung is set to move to 64-bit chips as well.

Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung processors are based on the ARM chip architecture and are inside the most popular mobile devices today.

Apple’s A7 chip first made its appearance in the iPhone 5S in September. On Tuesday, Apple put the A7 chip into its iPad Air and iPad Mini.

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