[Yetanfou]

Nope, it is pure marketing. There is no technical reason whatsoever for ad-blocking to require a 64 bit CPU or databus. It actually works fine on a single-core sub-Ghz ARM7 like that used in my phone (Motorola Defy) with all of 512MiB of memory.

[choppaface]

Huh, did you really run iOS9 ad blocking on a Motorola Defy? I definitely believe Apple's position is 99% marketing, but I can imagine there are some common pages that load really slow on older hardware. I've seen older iPads crash consistently trying to render complicated pages.

[Yetanfou]

Of course I did not run iOS on that Defy, why would I? Ad blocking was everywhere before apple finally decided to allow it on iOS. Inside those idevices are ARM-based CPUs, just like the ones in most other mobile hardware. What difference does it make whether the OS is based on Linux (Android), Mach/BSD (iOS) or even Windows (...Windows)? A regexp is a regexp after all...

The Defy does not crash rendering complex pages. It can get pretty slow though, reason for running extensions like NoScript for Android [1] (which runs just fine on the Fdroid.org Fennec build, ie. Firefox without the nasty bits) and uBlock origin.

[1] https://noscript.net/nsa/