once the 970 comes out how long will it take before the benefits can be seen because the software needs to be re- written. Im thinkin a year before adobe and macromedia come out with the next versions
Very few applications will need to be rewritten in any substantial way. Most will have no use for the extra precision. Some will need no more than a recompile to gain the extra power; some will need new code, but not much.
The PPC was designed to be 64-bit right off the bat, so the 970 won't break anything. 32-bit apps - including all the apps you have now, and all Classic apps - will run just as they always have, blissfully unaware that they're being executed on a 64-bit processor, and with essentially no performance penalty for being 32-bit.
Meanwhile, new apps that have never run on Macs before because they require 64 bit architectures will start appearing, and the platform will acquire applications that are so high-end they make Photoshop look like an iApp. That will be the interesting part.
I expect this transition to be very smooth, because the original designers of the PPC prepared for it years ago.
Driver software could be a bit of an issue, but we're not going to know until Apple rolls out the 64-bit OS X. They might have some slick software tricks in IOKit to support 32-bit drivers in the 64-bit kernel... or they might not. I'm optimistic, but I'm also not intimately familiar with the technical issues.
<strong>Very few applications will need to be rewritten in any substantial way. Most will have no use for the extra precision. Some will need no more than a recompile to gain the extra power; some will need new code, but not much.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I'd rephrase that as:
Very few applications will even be recompiled -> for the vast majority of applications there are precisely zero benefits, and zero negatives to being a '32-bit app' running on a 64-bit OS w the ppc CPU. These applications will run as is at full speed. Complete ground up rewrites would not provide benefits for the majority of consumer apps.
The key benefit is allowing those applications to run concurrently with other applications that can & will see benefits. Anything dealing with large streams of data (sound/video) at least has the potential to have a better 64-bit approach... although those are typically better served by AltiVec. Monster apps from science/engineering, programs needing access to more than 4GB of RAM... Databases - not personal recipe monitors in FileMaker, think more along the lines of Amazon's order tracking database (though I can't remember if they use Oracle).
Very few of those applications are sold in boxes off shelves, and most of those that are sold in boxes really only need a recompile to access more RAM.
There won't be any penalty for iCal (which is probably doomed to always be a 32-bit app unless you can think of more than 4 billion events in your life you'd like to track), and there won't be any benefit for iCal either.
Could we take one of these "what about 64-bitness" threads and make a list of programs that might possibly see _some_ benefit? I really don't see anything on my computer other than DVD/Quicktime (which may or maynot) and custom science code that has any hole of flourishing under 64-bitness.
Could we take one of these "what about 64-bitness" threads and make a list of programs that might possibly see _some_ benefit? I really don't see anything on my computer other than DVD/Quicktime (which may or maynot) and custom science code that has any hole of flourishing under 64-bitness.
i understand that, to a certain level, photoshop would benefit from it, given a high-enough source image bit depth, so would vid boards (i'm not sure you can run 48-bit + alpha display off a 32 bit proc...).
the problem would of course be the output, but then again, the more leeway you have when working on the file, the better...
Encryption and a lot of graphical areas can be done using Altivec.
The time for new software will be the same as it always is though. Roughly the time it takes them between releases. If there is some gain for the app in a 64 bit environment I'd expect the first release of that software after the systems are released to take the step. Most apps won't see any change in the slightest though.
The greatest general benefit of the 970 has much more to do with the fact it is an all round better desktop chip. Being a 64 bit chip isn't really of that much consequence for most people or applications.
Personally though I can't wait. I can finally stop running a separate workstation and do everything on my Mac.
<strong>Hm. You all miss the most imporant thing with going 64-bit - being able to address >2GB of memory per process.
This is something that is truly useful for most media-intensive applications - digital media = huge RAM requirements for good performance.
Of course, they would have to ship hardware that allows more than 2GB physical RAM to make it really nice.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The 2 GB per process limit applies to Windows, not Mac OS X. On X, there is a 4 GB per process limit. I am not really sure if there will be an increase in this, as the 970 doesn't have 64 bit physical memory addressing, "only" 42-bit, and the present G4+ already has 36-bit. The big change will be the fact that some programmes might make some assumptions on the basis of 32-bit integer arithmetic.
The 2 GB per process limit applies to Windows, not Mac OS X. On X, there is a 4 GB per process limit. I am not really sure if there will be an increase in this, as the 970 doesn't have 64 bit physical memory addressing, "only" 42-bit, and the present G4+ already has 36-bit. The big change will be the fact that some programmes might make some assumptions on the basis of 32-bit integer arithmetic.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Ok, the kernel may well use an unsigned 32bit for addressing, the point is still valid. I'm not concerned about the hardware addressing part of it - as you say, it's already 36-bit (64GB) - but for heavy duty media applications, 4GB could well be limiting in terms of virtual address space.
Even on a machine with 2GB of memory, a 4GB address space may be on the low side for certain applications (that you need to reserve addresses for certain pieces of memory does not necessarily mean that it has a physical RAM backing store...)
Very few applications will even be recompiled</strong><hr></blockquote>
Nah. A good number of them will be recompiled. Not immediately, not to gain the benefits of 64 bit, but to run faster on the CPU - just as apps were recompiled going from the 7400 to the 745x G4 to better take advantage of that architecture.
It's true that some applications will get a bit more wiggle room with the ability to address more than 4GB of logical memory, but I don't think that will make as much of a difference as Apple's newfound ability to sell machines with more than 1.5GB of physical RAM, now that OS 9 support is no longer an issue.
fp SPEC is for the 1.8GHZ 970 is estimated to be approx 700% higher than fp SPEC for a 1GHZ. This alone will make anyone using a Mac for 3D much happier.
There won't be any penalty for iCal (which is probably doomed to always be a 32-bit app unless you can think of more than 4 billion events in your life you'd like to track), and there won't be any benefit for iCal either.</strong><hr></blockquote>
If you lived to be 100 years old, your life would only be 3.1 billion seconds long. I don't think it will be a problem....
If you lived to be 100 years old, your life would only be 3.1 billion seconds long. I don't think it will be a problem....</strong><hr></blockquote>
That's what I'm saying That's just one thing, but 4 billion is a LOT. I mean, do we care if Bill Gates can't use Quicken because it overflows? How many picture do you have? (Hint, if you took 1/s for life it still wouldn't overflow).
Guys, you really don't seem to be getting all the facts straight... please pay attention:
- The 970 has a 42-bit physical addressing which allows it to use about 4400 gigabytes of real memory.
- The 970 can provide a 64-bit logical address space to 64-bit applications which allows them to address about 16 billion billion bytes. If you had enough hard disk space and the page tables were small enough, you could have that much virtual memory in one app. Unlikely to happen, that is a lot of memory.
- This has nothing (zip, nadda, zilch) to do with the size of pixels on the video card or used by the graphics subsystem. For things being processed on the processor (and lots is handled by the GPU) the existing G4 could be used to process any depth of graphics, albeit slowly, and it can use AltiVec to process up to 128-bit colour quite quickly. The bottleneck here is memory bandwidth, not how big a number the processor can process.
- Video processing apps are necessarily going to use 64-bit memory addressing. Memory mapping in a video is not necessarily any more efficient than just reading in the frames as they are needed. Recoding an app that way limits it to working on just 64-bit Macs.
- A processor isn't limited to working on numbers that are the size of its word length, it just takes more than one instruction to process larger numbers. Most compilers come with 64-bit integer support built into them already for 32-bit processors. This is done in the same way that humans do multi-digit math. Think of the machine is having digits which instead of ranging from 0..9, range from 0..4294967295 (techie types please forgive my overgeneralization).
- The G4 can already do 64-bit double precision floating point which covers most of the cases where you need big numbers.
Look at Mathmatica -- it isn't limited in the size of the numbers that it can process. Almost all of the benefit of a 64-bit machine will be in the larger addressing space that is possible, and very few apps actually need that (databases being key among them).
When the PPC970 comes out, we better see a 9600-like machine with at least 8 or 10 RAM slots. Huge amounts of addressable memory means that I can go into 64-bit Final Cut Pro and put my entire project into RAMdisk, rendering the most complex of transitions in realtime...
THAT is the killer app of 64-bit computing for me.
Comments
The PPC was designed to be 64-bit right off the bat, so the 970 won't break anything. 32-bit apps - including all the apps you have now, and all Classic apps - will run just as they always have, blissfully unaware that they're being executed on a 64-bit processor, and with essentially no performance penalty for being 32-bit.
Meanwhile, new apps that have never run on Macs before because they require 64 bit architectures will start appearing, and the platform will acquire applications that are so high-end they make Photoshop look like an iApp. That will be the interesting part.
I expect this transition to be very smooth, because the original designers of the PPC prepared for it years ago.
[ 01-28-2003: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
<strong>Very few applications will need to be rewritten in any substantial way. Most will have no use for the extra precision. Some will need no more than a recompile to gain the extra power; some will need new code, but not much.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I'd rephrase that as:
Very few applications will even be recompiled -> for the vast majority of applications there are precisely zero benefits, and zero negatives to being a '32-bit app' running on a 64-bit OS w the ppc CPU. These applications will run as is at full speed. Complete ground up rewrites would not provide benefits for the majority of consumer apps.
The key benefit is allowing those applications to run concurrently with other applications that can & will see benefits. Anything dealing with large streams of data (sound/video) at least has the potential to have a better 64-bit approach... although those are typically better served by AltiVec. Monster apps from science/engineering, programs needing access to more than 4GB of RAM... Databases - not personal recipe monitors in FileMaker, think more along the lines of Amazon's order tracking database (though I can't remember if they use Oracle).
Very few of those applications are sold in boxes off shelves, and most of those that are sold in boxes really only need a recompile to access more RAM.
There won't be any penalty for iCal (which is probably doomed to always be a 32-bit app unless you can think of more than 4 billion events in your life you'd like to track), and there won't be any benefit for iCal either.
Could we take one of these "what about 64-bitness" threads and make a list of programs that might possibly see _some_ benefit? I really don't see anything on my computer other than DVD/Quicktime (which may or maynot) and custom science code that has any hole of flourishing under 64-bitness.
[ 01-29-2003: Message edited by: Nevyn ]</p>
<strong>
Could we take one of these "what about 64-bitness" threads and make a list of programs that might possibly see _some_ benefit? I really don't see anything on my computer other than DVD/Quicktime (which may or maynot) and custom science code that has any hole of flourishing under 64-bitness.
[ 01-29-2003: Message edited by: Nevyn ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
i understand that, to a certain level, photoshop would benefit from it, given a high-enough source image bit depth, so would vid boards (i'm not sure you can run 48-bit + alpha display off a 32 bit proc...).
the problem would of course be the output, but then again, the more leeway you have when working on the file, the better...
The time for new software will be the same as it always is though. Roughly the time it takes them between releases. If there is some gain for the app in a 64 bit environment I'd expect the first release of that software after the systems are released to take the step. Most apps won't see any change in the slightest though.
The greatest general benefit of the 970 has much more to do with the fact it is an all round better desktop chip. Being a 64 bit chip isn't really of that much consequence for most people or applications.
Personally though I can't wait. I can finally stop running a separate workstation and do everything on my Mac.
This is something that is truly useful for most media-intensive applications - digital media = huge RAM requirements for good performance.
Of course, they would have to ship hardware that allows more than 2GB physical RAM to make it really nice.
<strong>Hm. You all miss the most imporant thing with going 64-bit - being able to address >2GB of memory per process.
This is something that is truly useful for most media-intensive applications - digital media = huge RAM requirements for good performance.
Of course, they would have to ship hardware that allows more than 2GB physical RAM to make it really nice.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The 2 GB per process limit applies to Windows, not Mac OS X. On X, there is a 4 GB per process limit. I am not really sure if there will be an increase in this, as the 970 doesn't have 64 bit physical memory addressing, "only" 42-bit, and the present G4+ already has 36-bit. The big change will be the fact that some programmes might make some assumptions on the basis of 32-bit integer arithmetic.
<strong>
The 2 GB per process limit applies to Windows, not Mac OS X. On X, there is a 4 GB per process limit. I am not really sure if there will be an increase in this, as the 970 doesn't have 64 bit physical memory addressing, "only" 42-bit, and the present G4+ already has 36-bit. The big change will be the fact that some programmes might make some assumptions on the basis of 32-bit integer arithmetic.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Ok, the kernel may well use an unsigned 32bit for addressing, the point is still valid. I'm not concerned about the hardware addressing part of it - as you say, it's already 36-bit (64GB) - but for heavy duty media applications, 4GB could well be limiting in terms of virtual address space.
Even on a machine with 2GB of memory, a 4GB address space may be on the low side for certain applications (that you need to reserve addresses for certain pieces of memory does not necessarily mean that it has a physical RAM backing store...)
<strong>
I'd rephrase that as:
Very few applications will even be recompiled</strong><hr></blockquote>
Nah. A good number of them will be recompiled. Not immediately, not to gain the benefits of 64 bit, but to run faster on the CPU - just as apps were recompiled going from the 7400 to the 745x G4 to better take advantage of that architecture.
It's true that some applications will get a bit more wiggle room with the ability to address more than 4GB of logical memory, but I don't think that will make as much of a difference as Apple's newfound ability to sell machines with more than 1.5GB of physical RAM, now that OS 9 support is no longer an issue.
<a href="http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/whpapr/64simple.htm"; target="_blank">IBM on benefits of 64-bit computing (from 1996) </a>
The text has not much to say about non-database stuff (scientific and multimedia application), but it is easy to read and entertaining.
Before you'd say that it is completely off topic, the AS/400 uses 64 bit variants of POWERPC processors since 1996.
1) have maya run at decent speeds
2) rid ourselves of the beach ball
3) find out what life is like without a progress bar
4) get Final Cut Pro in a TOTALLY real time version
5) kick the cr*p out of the wintel world
?
<strong>does this all mean that despite the 970 we still won't be able to:
1) have maya run at decent speeds
2) rid ourselves of the beach ball
3) find out what life is like without a progress bar
4) get Final Cut Pro in a TOTALLY real time version
5) kick the cr*p out of the wintel world
?</strong><hr></blockquote>
No
I mean, Yes (misread the question)
[ 01-30-2003: Message edited by: strobe ]</p>
<strong>
There won't be any penalty for iCal (which is probably doomed to always be a 32-bit app unless you can think of more than 4 billion events in your life you'd like to track), and there won't be any benefit for iCal either.</strong><hr></blockquote>
If you lived to be 100 years old, your life would only be 3.1 billion seconds long. I don't think it will be a problem....
<strong>
If you lived to be 100 years old, your life would only be 3.1 billion seconds long. I don't think it will be a problem....</strong><hr></blockquote>
That's what I'm saying
<strong>
(Hint, if you took 1/s for life it still wouldn't overflow).</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, at 1-3MB/photo something would probably overflow pretty quickly.
- The 970 has a 42-bit physical addressing which allows it to use about 4400 gigabytes of real memory.
- The 970 can provide a 64-bit logical address space to 64-bit applications which allows them to address about 16 billion billion bytes. If you had enough hard disk space and the page tables were small enough, you could have that much virtual memory in one app. Unlikely to happen, that is a lot of memory.
- This has nothing (zip, nadda, zilch) to do with the size of pixels on the video card or used by the graphics subsystem. For things being processed on the processor (and lots is handled by the GPU) the existing G4 could be used to process any depth of graphics, albeit slowly, and it can use AltiVec to process up to 128-bit colour quite quickly. The bottleneck here is memory bandwidth, not how big a number the processor can process.
- Video processing apps are necessarily going to use 64-bit memory addressing. Memory mapping in a video is not necessarily any more efficient than just reading in the frames as they are needed. Recoding an app that way limits it to working on just 64-bit Macs.
- A processor isn't limited to working on numbers that are the size of its word length, it just takes more than one instruction to process larger numbers. Most compilers come with 64-bit integer support built into them already for 32-bit processors. This is done in the same way that humans do multi-digit math. Think of the machine is having digits which instead of ranging from 0..9, range from 0..4294967295 (techie types please forgive my overgeneralization).
- The G4 can already do 64-bit double precision floating point which covers most of the cases where you need big numbers.
Look at Mathmatica -- it isn't limited in the size of the numbers that it can process. Almost all of the benefit of a 64-bit machine will be in the larger addressing space that is possible, and very few apps actually need that (databases being key among them).
THAT is the killer app of 64-bit computing for me.