Hey yall, I was just reading about 32 bit and 64 bit cpus, Could someone tell me the diffrence between the two? isnt it like more clock cycles times 64?, and shouldnt the renders support it regardless cause of the cpu itself? or you need a 64 bit app?
I'm no expert but from my limited understanding it looks like the biggest benefit you get from a 64bit processor versus a 32bit processor is the extra memory addressing capabilities.
Simply put, you have more room for your large calculations to take place. Your system does not have to resort to memory swapping tricks (caching to hard disk which is very time consuming) to finish its set of work that you put before it (whatever number crunching your having your app(s) do).
Some apps will perform WORSE by moving them from 32bit to 64bit from what i have read. I don't really understand it but it looks like the app authors need to determine where the "sweet spot" is for their programs and either retool what if any parts can take advantage of the additional memory space and the different math libraries that become involved OR do nothing since there is no direct benefit from making the move.
Hopefully some others that are more knowledgeable about this sort of thing can jump in and explain things better and/or correct me where i am wrong.
Please and thank you.
Regards,
john
I still haven't heard anything from Softimage (XSI), Alias (Maya) and Apple (Shake) if they will even support 64-bit. Right now all those apps are 32-bit and can't take advantage of the 64-bit CPU. It doesn't make much financial sense to upgrade to the expensive 64-bit CPU when the current software market hasn't caught up.
I also herd that it could make some programs horibly slow, why would that even happen for an upgraded cpu? more mem and all that good stuff?
64 bit numbers are larger for one.
For another; its possible that the 64 bit registers just aren't as fast as the 32 bit registers on a given CPU (an example would be the geforceFX when dealing with 32 bit precision as opposed to 16 bit precision);
Well the reason is simple memory is as slow as on a 32 bit computer... but you must allways acces 64 bits at a time. Offcourse the pipe can be faster, wider too, but it doesent mean it is! Also the adressbook is bigger so finding it takes a slighty longer.
Also what if your operation only need a part of this info, like 8 or 16 or 32 bits being enough, now you ccouldnt use normal operations but instead some strange ooperators that syncroniously works on all of theese bits at the same time. And programers dont work on such lo levell s unless your prog is compiled with a compiler that does this then your screwed. Besides theres no guarantee it can be done. If so you just wasted a lot of compuational power. Also this could lead to wsted storage too, unless you chunk them up and rechung them down wich again uses computational power.
Part of the reason why cd players are 1 bit processing machines instead off 16 bit like they were in beginning.
More is not allways better, less many times better in most cases. Altough here it is but not yet!
From what I can tell, CPU speed is still king as far as our type of apps. are concerned.
Rendering, dynamics and UI calculations seem to mostly benefit from raw CPU (or GPU) clock cycles, given ample system RAM.
The 64-bit system offerings just don't give the same clock speeds.....
Other variables such as RAM type, and CPU type (to a lesser degree) seem the next most important factor to oerall application performance.
Of course, if you're doing compositing, you must have adequate bandwidth to and from your hard drives. IDE, SCSI and ATA disk stripes are the standard configuration for acheiving plentiful disk access.
***I can see where maybe the 64 bit composisiting apps, when used at film and HD resolutions might actually benefit from 64-bit system architectture and disk journaling due to the huge memory handling requirements for all those massive frames.
KIWI
clock speed is not a good indicator. You have Oppies that are 1 ghz "slower" versus top of the line Xeon's and the Oppies are walking away with the speed crown.
Architecture and optimization go a long way in the battle for speed supremacy.