[Ado]

Okay just a lil outline, Ive been using macs since '86, went to Amiga in the 90's for its superior 3D and 2D capabilities and then went back to mac in the 7300 days.

We have all waited and waited through transitions, one of the hardest but most fun was classic to carbon. But yet as a lightwaver trying to do 3D we are left with no real 64-bit version of anything.
Newtek (lightwave makers) and many other writers blame Apple for not making OSX 64-bit (ui is the blame) yet releasing g5 that has a 64bit chip.
Now Apple releases a new transition - Intel.

So now we have intel chips that arent 64-bit in a non 64bit OS but due for release in June is a universal OSX that most likey will be 64-bit...heheheh tiresome eh.

I am in the transition of needing another mac, the new imacs are cool but are 32bit and i would love to use the 64 bit lightwave version that handles heaps more polys and renders quicker, but we wont get this till we are on a 100% full 64bit system.

[kernokerno]

Originally Posted by Ado

Okay just a lil outline, Ive been using macs since '86, went to Amiga in the 90's for its superior 3D and 2D capabilities and then went back to mac in the 7300 days.

We have all waited and waited through transitions, one of the hardest but most fun was classic to carbon. But yet as a lightwaver trying to do 3D we are left with no real 64-bit version of anything.
Newtek (lightwave makers) and many other writers blame Apple for not making OSX 64-bit (ui is the blame) yet releasing g5 that has a 64bit chip.
Now Apple releases a new transition - Intel.

So now we have intel chips that arent 64-bit in a non 64bit OS but due for release in June is a universal OSX that most likey will be 64-bit...heheheh tiresome eh.

I am in the transition of needing another mac, the new imacs are cool but are 32bit and i would love to use the 64 bit lightwave version that handles heaps more polys and renders quicker, but we wont get this till we are on a 100% full 64bit system.

there are like 1000 threads about this

[Tomchu]

Looks like you might have to with a dual-core Athlon 64 and 64-bit Windows if you really need a system soon.

[Maflynn]

who cares.

I work on a G4 powerbook and a G5 powermac. The G5 is faster but that could be because its almost a full gigahertz faster and there's a second processor. What does 64 bit cpu give you - really. cast aside the marketing fluff and the applications and OS execute the same whether its a 32 bit or a 64 bit system. Sometimes we get so hung up on these things we fail to see the forest through the trees.

The G5 is a capable machine that happes to be 64 bit, but it does not have any more functionality then my 32bit powerbook.

Mike

[slugslugslug]

Leopard is not gonna be released in June. Except maybe to developers.

[Tomchu]

I don't know about OS X and G5s, but 64-bit can make a world of difference in some apps on XP x64 + Athlon 64.

[Ado]

I am not talking about some gay photoshop work, 2D was never a problem with whatever transition.
This is talk for a true 64bit intergration for 3D designers. When you are in need of another mac and you need the latest, right now its limbo.
I have 2x Shuttle PC's here and would love to install OSX on them, but im not sure you can.



Is Apple doing this:

Leaving the 32bit platform for the i series.
64bit for the pro series?

[mduell]

Why do you want 64-bit?
Does it give your apps some great new capability? No.
Does it gives your apps some incredible speed boost?

[Tomchu]

Depending on what you're going from, moving to 64-bit can give some apps a very healthy speed boost. It's all about the registers -- at least on x86-64.

[iomatic]

I have a question for those who are knowledgeable: is there hardware, an operating system, and applications all optimized for 64-bit? That's affordable?

If not, maybe the blame on Apple is a little misplaced if the market is still not even out of 32-bit yet.

[Salty]

This is understandable that you're concerned. But OS X is hardly a platform targeted specifically at 3D Devs so your frustration is valid, but Apple really don't have you in mind as their prime audience.

[Chuckit]

What is that about Apple needing to compile the GUI as 64-bit?

[slugslugslug]

Originally Posted by mduell

Why do you want 64-bit?
Does it give your apps some great new capability? No.
Does it gives your apps some incredible speed boost?

C'mon, Mark, if his next Mac isn't 64-bit, people might think he's gay or uses Photoshop (well, clearly that's really the same thing, but..) A manly 3D man cannot stand for 32 bits.

Anyway, I do think Apple will use a 64-bit CPU in the Mac Pro (or whatever), for the sake of the people who've been buying G5s specifically for their 64-bitness. Probably mostly scientific-computing types, though I would think that it actually would do something for 3D rendering (but I'm not sure if any engines take advantage of it..)

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by slugslugslug

Leopard is not gonna be released in June. Except maybe to developers.

I was going to say; where did this "Leopard is coming in June" thing come from?

[boots]

We had Gaussian running 32 bit and then switched to 64 bit. The difference was amazing. If you haven't seen the difference with programs that are very calculation heavy, you can't appreciate the difference. Granted, this is a qualitative assessment, but I can see where the 3D modeling people would be crying for 64 bit. It makes that much of a difference.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by boots

We had Gaussian running 32 bit and then switched to 64 bit. The difference was amazing. If you haven't seen the difference with programs that are very calculation heavy, you can't appreciate the difference. Granted, this is a qualitative assessment, but I can see where the 3D modeling people would be crying for 64 bit. It makes that much of a difference.

If you're running super-calculation-heavy programs, I don't recommend you buy an iMac anyway. It's not as though they've completely cut ties with 64-bit processors now and forever.

[slugslugslug]

Well, for the record, all y'all heterosexual 3D jockeys out there, some site claims that since Sossaman and Yonah are "the same," and Sossaman supports Intel's 64-bit instruction set, that the Core Duo is actually a 64-bit chip.

I don't know, though. The site in question uses very annoying graphics and slang, and I'd never heard of them 'til Gizmodo linked to that article. And, well, it just seems like if what they're saying is true, somebody woulda noticed it before. I'd guess they're just mistaken about that whole "the same" bit.

But I imagine someone who follows these things more closely than me (Mr. Duell? Eug?) will show up in this thread to set the record, er, straight.

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by iomatic

I have a question for those who are knowledgeable: is there hardware, an operating system, and applications all optimized for 64-bit? That's affordable?

http://www.sgi.com/products/software/irix/

Affordable?, since it is almost dead, you can find cheap used SGI stuff on ebay, resellers…

[boots]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

If you're running super-calculation-heavy programs, I don't recommend you buy an iMac anyway. It's not as though they've completely cut ties with 64-bit processors now and forever.

True. We don't use iMacs. We have an opteron cluster.

Just commenting on the fact that there is a difference between 64 and 32 bit for some things.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by iomatic

I have a question for those who are knowledgeable: is there hardware, an operating system, and applications all optimized for 64-bit? That's affordable?

If not, maybe the blame on Apple is a little misplaced if the market is still not even out of 32-bit yet.

Yes; Linux on AMD64 or Intel chips with EM64T. Most of the benchmarks show marginal gains.

Originally Posted by Salty

This is understandable that you're concerned. But OS X is hardly a platform targeted specifically at 3D Devs so your frustration is valid, but Apple really don't have you in mind as their prime audience.

Apple.com disagrees.

Originally Posted by boots

We had Gaussian running 32 bit and then switched to 64 bit. The difference was amazing. If you haven't seen the difference with programs that are very calculation heavy, you can't appreciate the difference. Granted, this is a qualitative assessment, but I can see where the 3D modeling people would be crying for 64 bit. It makes that much of a difference.

Some apps that make extensive use of 64-bit data types will see significant improvements; most apps don't, and won't.

Originally Posted by slugslugslug

Well, for the record, all y'all heterosexual 3D jockeys out there, some site claims that since Sossaman and Yonah are "the same," and Sossaman supports Intel's 64-bit instruction set, that the Core Duo is actually a 64-bit chip.

I don't know, though. The site in question uses very annoying graphics and slang, and I'd never heard of them 'til Gizmodo linked to that article. And, well, it just seems like if what they're saying is true, somebody woulda noticed it before. I'd guess they're just mistaken about that whole "the same" bit.

But I imagine someone who follows these things more closely than me (Mr. Duell? Eug?) will show up in this thread to set the record, er, straight.

From everything I've seen, Sossaman will be Yonah+SMP. However this would not be the first time Intel put 64-bit circuitry in a chip without enabling it: the Prescott Pentium 4s had all the 64-bit circuitry in them (which about doubled the number of non-cache transistors), but disabled. I'll see if I can dig up the transistor counts for Dothan and Yonah.
I'm more excited about Vanderpool/VT than 64-bit.

edit: For both cores combined Yonah has ~42m non-cache transistors (using the 55m/MB rule of thumb) and Dothan had ~30m non-cache transistors; it looks like quite a bit of the chip is shared between the two cores (like the FSB interface).
Adding 64-bit to the Pentium 4 went from ~23m non-cache transistors (Northwood, 55m total) to ~70m non-cache transistors (Prescott, 125m total).

[Tomchu]

When going from x86 to x86-64, you will see gains in many apps, even those that do not use 64-bit data types. AMD added another 8 GP registers, and another 8 SIMD registers to the architecture. Since 32-bit x86 is severely constrained by its measly 8 registers, doubling that to 16 causes some programs to jump very noticeably in performance.

As for EM64T ... Intel's AMD64 implementation is a hack, and causes a decrease in performance in most cases, whereas on an Athlon 64/Opteron performance increases.

[Tomchu]

By the way, you need to read up a bit about your CPUs. :-P

Northwood, no 64-bit, 512 KB L2, 55m transistors
Prescott 5XX, no 64-bit enabled but present, 1 MB L2, 125m transistors
Prescott 6XX, 64-bit enabled, 2 MB L2, 169m transistors

So we can see that going from 5xx to 6xx, the only real addition was another 1 MB of L2. 169 - 125 = 44 million transistors per MB of L2. Going by that, Northwood had about 33m non-cache transistors, while Prescott 5XX had about 81.

There's a 48 million transistor difference there (between Northwood and 1 MB Prescott), and most of it has nothing to do with 64-bit:

- Prescott has a 31-stage pipeline, vs. Northwood's 20-stage
- Prescott has a larger L1 (8KB, 4-way associative vs. 16KB, 8-way associative)
- Prescott added 13 new instructions (SSE3)
- Prescott has a better prefetcher
- Prescott has somewhat enhanced HT
- A ton of other architectural tweaks (branch prediction, ALUs, x87 FPU, etc.)

The EM64T additions weren't really that astounding. The chip is not true 64-bit internally, but rather just re-uses or extends its 32-bit components in some creative ways. Take for instance the ALUs on a Prescott ... they're 32-bit, and if you want to do a 64-bit operation, it just turns that into two 32-bit operations. That's what I call a hack.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Tomchu

By the way, you need to read up a bit about your CPUs. :-P

Northwood, no 64-bit, 512 KB L2, 55m transistors
Prescott 5XX, no 64-bit enabled but present, 1 MB L2, 125m transistors
Prescott 6XX, 64-bit enabled, 2 MB L2, 169m transistors

So we can see that going from 5xx to 6xx, the only real addition was another 1 MB of L2. 169 - 125 = 44 million transistors per MB of L2.

If I recall my EE correctly, SRAM requires 6 transistors per bit, so you need at least 50.3m transistors per megabyte; there's usually ~10% overhead for addressing and other logic, making the actual figure closer to 55m/MB. There may be other changes between the two Prescott revisions that saved transistors.

Even for encryption benchmarks that are nearly all math (instead of logic), using large data-types, the gains are marginal.

edit: More 64-bit vs 32-bit benchmarks: Video and audio compression (tiny differences) File compression, rendering, and ScienceMark (tiny differences)
There are times when 64-bit is great and doubles your performance, but most of the time the difference is marginal.

[Tomchu]

You got me on the SRAM calculations. Intel must have trimmed transistors somewhere else in that case.

As for the benchmarks ... some of the encryption results show significant (~100%) improvements in performance. From the same review, there's also this. Compression shows a significant gain as well.

The rest of the benchmarks you linked me to (Tom's Hardware) are irrelevant. That was a test of Windows XP x64 performance running 32-bit applications vs. 32-bit XP running the same applications, not a comparison of 32-bit vs. 64-bit applications. If you look at their tests, they're not using any 64-bit software.

[Abit667]

Originally Posted by mduell

If I recall my EE correctly, SRAM requires 6 transistors per bit, so you need at least 50.3m transistors per megabyte; there's usually ~10% overhead for addressing and other logic, making the actual figure closer to 55m/MB. There may be other changes between the two Prescott revisions that saved transistors.

Even for encryption benchmarks that are nearly all math (instead of logic), using large data-types, the gains are marginal.

edit: More 64-bit vs 32-bit benchmarks: Video and audio compression (tiny differences) File compression, rendering, and ScienceMark (tiny differences)
There are times when 64-bit is great and doubles your performance, but most of the time the difference is marginal.

In the articles you linked to, the tests were all done using 32bit programs. They were just running on a 64bit OS, running in a compatability layer. Of course there isn't going to be any differences. On x86_64 gets double the amount of registers as x86 which can make some fairly large differences in some applications. Take a look at Linux on x86_64, the gains are really there.

[shabbasuraj]

Originally Posted by Ado

Okay just a lil outline, Ive been using macs since '86, went to Amiga in the 90's for its superior 3D and 2D capabilities and then went back to mac in the 7300 days.

We have all waited and waited through transitions, one of the hardest but most fun was classic to carbon. But yet as a lightwaver trying to do 3D we are left with no real 64-bit version of anything.
Newtek (lightwave makers) and many other writers blame Apple for not making OSX 64-bit (ui is the blame) yet releasing g5 that has a 64bit chip.
Now Apple releases a new transition - Intel.

So now we have intel chips that arent 64-bit in a non 64bit OS but due for release in June is a universal OSX that most likey will be 64-bit...heheheh tiresome eh.

I am in the transition of needing another mac, the new imacs are cool but are 32bit and i would love to use the 64 bit lightwave version that handles heaps more polys and renders quicker, but we wont get this till we are on a 100% full 64bit system.

your rant is tiresome