Who would use 64 bit ints on the 970?
As the 970 will 'wipe the floor' with the current G4 with respect to processing power, I'm certain that most people care about that first. But I'm curious to know who of you are just as interested (if not more) in the aspect of 64-bit computing. In other words, do you intend to write or use software to take specific advantage of the 64 bit ints that the 970 offers?
I can say for a fact that I would. As a user of GMP, 64 bit ints give an immediate advantage without additional CPU speed. And in theory, GMP should support the 970 'out of the box' as it already supports the Power4.
--Mark
I can say for a fact that I would. As a user of GMP, 64 bit ints give an immediate advantage without additional CPU speed. And in theory, GMP should support the 970 'out of the box' as it already supports the Power4.
--Mark
Comments
Lightwave.
But 300 dpi Photoshop work, actions and filters...should get a big boost.
They're the two I'm most interested in. But for overall application boosts? Should be electric.
Lemon Bon Bon :cool:
QuickTime will no doubt be extended to allow 64-bit applications to use it, but that is quite different than having a 64-bit application -- it enables 64-bit media applications.
My worry is that lazy programmer syndrome will strike again and some developers will use 64-bits because it allows them to be even more sloppy in the way that code things. You get worse software, not better. Hopefully the large number of existing and future 32-bit machines will minimize that.
I don't know what will use 64-bit integers, apart from a few apps that will welcome the essentially limitless VM space. However, that won't buy you all that much more if you're on a machine with, say 512MB of RAM. Unless you really like watching your machine thrash.
<a href="http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/"; target="_blank">WWDC</a> has an "Enterprise IT" track. That and high-end video and 3D are where we'll see lots of 64-bit goodness. iMovie and the other Apple consumer apps can and will remain 32 bit for some time - except for iTunes, which apparently has a 32,768 song limit. Perhaps it will move to 32 bit with OS X 10.3.
[ 02-22-2003: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
<strong>Unfortunately, lazy programmer syndrome has already struck. Without making excuses for Mot, AirSluf has pointed out that part of the reason for the G4's poor showing in real-world FP is that a lot of FP-intensive apps are already using 64-bit FP because it's easier. I won't even go into the laziness enabled by the greater robustness of OS X, and the ease of Cocoa. The amount of work you had to do to get a full Mac OS app done was maddening and gruelling, but when you were done you had something pretty darn bulletproof. Unless you were MS.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Sorry, but I have to disagree with this 100%. The more effort it takes to just get the basic functionality up and running, the less likely a developer is to make it robust and full featured. Cocoa is great because it takes away a lot of the crud that was involved in pre-X MacOS development, and that means developers don't have to worry about writing that crud and the users don't have to worry about there being bugs in it.
[quote]<strong>
I don't know what will use 64-bit integers, apart from a few apps that will welcome the essentially limitless VM space. However, that won't buy you all that much more if you're on a machine with, say 512MB of RAM. Unless you really like watching your machine thrash.
<a href="http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/"; target="_blank">WWDC</a> has an "Enterprise IT" track. That and high-end video and 3D are where we'll see lots of 64-bit goodness. iMovie and the other Apple consumer apps can and will remain 32 bit for some time - except for iTunes, which apparently has a 32,768 song limit. Perhaps it will move to 32 bit with OS X 10.3.
I really don't think that video apps need 64-bit. Why load the whole thing into memory? For the most part frames are operated on one at a time, and the whole video subsystem (i.e. QuickTime) is built around the idea of streaming frames into memory.
Huge databases can definitely use 64-bit address spaces, but then you want the RAM to be there. A few scientific and financial apps will use 64-bit integers for performance improvements. Remember, however, that the existing hardware can already use 64-bit integers, its just a bit slower.
One interesting technique that uses 64-bit address spaces without having to have tons of RAM is called "sparse matrices". This is useful when you have just a little data spread over a very large space. I doubt many applications have to do that, however.
Frankly I think 64-bitness will have very little impact on most users. Servers and scientific apps, yes. As a marketing tool, yes. For some novelty programming tricks, yes. The real impact of the 970, however, will be performance, performance, performance.
[ 02-22-2003: Message edited by: Programmer ]</p>
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<img src="graemlins/cancer.gif" border="0" alt="[cancer]" />
...and that will impact Lightwave and Photoshop.
<img src="graemlins/cancer.gif" border="0" alt="[cancer]" />
Lemon Bon Bon
<strong>orry, but I have to disagree with this 100%. The more effort it takes to just get the basic functionality up and running, the less likely a developer is to make it robust and full featured. Cocoa is great because it takes away a lot of the crud that was involved in pre-X MacOS development, and that means developers don't have to worry about writing that crud and the users don't have to worry about there being bugs in it.</strong><hr></blockquote>
That's true, but making an app full-featured is another problem.
As for the full-featured bit, the poor programmer had to put up with the characteristically high expectations of Mac users.
I'm not in any way arguing that the old way was better. Far from it: I actually program in OS X for fun now; I only programmed Mac OS when I was paid to. But you can get sloppier with a Cocoa app than you ever could with a Mac OS app, simply because Cocoa and OS X are both so much more robust. I've noticed that memory leaks are a more common problem now that they don't hobble and crash the application (or the whole system, if the leak was in temporary memory).
[quote]<strong>
I really don't think that video apps need 64-bit. Why load the whole thing into memory? For the most part frames are operated on one at a time, and the whole video subsystem (i.e. QuickTime) is built around the idea of streaming frames into memory.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Mostly to accomodate 3D animation at an acceptable level of performance: a lot of high-end video apps have limited 3D rendering and animation capabilities in order to do those spiffy flying-logo animations you see all over TV. The extremely rich color gamut required for cinema doesn't fit in 32 bits either - 24-bit looks grainy and washed out unless the cinematographer is really good at working around its limitations.
This is unlikely to require 64 bit integers, but then this thread drifted off of that subject pretty quickly.
[quote]<strong>One interesting technique that uses 64-bit address spaces without having to have tons of RAM is called "sparse matrices". This is useful when you have just a little data spread over a very large space. I doubt many applications have to do that, however.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The ones that do also do already use the technique.
[quote]<strong>Frankly I think 64-bitness will have very little impact on most users. Servers and scientific apps, yes. As a marketing tool, yes. For some novelty programming tricks, yes. The real impact of the 970, however, will be performance, performance, performance.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I think the earliest impact will be in 3D. 3D authoring has crept down to the point where anyone with a halfway decent machine and some patience can use, say, ZBrush or Vue D'Esprit, and the high end is capable of mind-boggling things like Gollum. The 970's ability to crunch 64 bit values at high speeds will enable Apple to bring robust 3D authoring down to the iMac. Who knows? They might have some use for that themselves (iMovie? iDVD?). But if not, I can easily see some fairly amazing implications.
Not to mention the number of professionals salivating over being able to use Maya or Lightwave on a laptop. Send the data over Airport Extreme to a renderfarm for the heavy lifting...
<strong>The 970's ability to crunch 64 bit values at high speeds will enable Apple to bring robust 3D authoring down to the iMac.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Ironically this has nothing to do with the 970's "64-bitness". 3D uses either double or single precision floating point, and all PowerPCs since the 601 have supported both (well, at least all of the ones used in Macs). The 970 will just be a heck of a lot faster at it than the G4 is. Those 3D applications which are written to only require single precision floating point will not only be able to take advantage of AltiVec acceleration, they will likely also be able to use the latest GPUs and consequently get some real performance improvements.
<strong>
I really don't think that video apps need 64-bit. Why load the whole thing into memory? For the most part frames are operated on one at a time, and the whole video subsystem (i.e. QuickTime) is built around the idea of streaming frames into memory.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I'm not exactly sure how FCP handles things currently, but I have experienced the digital molasses of jumping around from sub-sequence to sub-sequence, only to hear a minor thrash-o-rama before seeing the video ...
Not that huge swaths 'o RAM would totally remove this annoyance; but it would probably help to get it down to about fan noise level.
I guess it's the difference between driving a Farari or a Focus ... if you've never driven anything better than the amiable Ford, the mushy steering and okie-dokie suspension don't bother you too much ... but what you don't realize is that, intuitively, your driving options bag is somewhat restrained, since trying to do certain maneuvers is rather, well, inconvenient ... and then, you hop into a Farari, and suddenly, you get used to being able to do all kinds of things without thinking. (which is expected if you can afford the necessary insurance)
I doubt a 64bit FCP with swaths 'O RAM will do all that much for the look of the app (except for some of that killer rendering as mentioned earlier), but I bet it would do plenty for the feel ...
<strong>I think some of the best things software writers can provide are 64 bit apps. I'm also hoping that Apple is already ahead of the game offerring every Apple title in 64 bit [...] Anyway, I would certainly migrate to all 64 bit apps when they are provided and when the OS and hardware actively support such a transition. </strong><hr></blockquote>
One thing that everyone will have to realise is that 64-bit applications can be, and often are, slower than their 32-bit counterparts. The reason this is true is because you're loading and storing double the amount of data into RAM.
As well, application startup is likely to be slower, because the application's binary itself will be larger. (Constants stored in the executable will be doubled in size.)
That being said, most high-end linear video editing applications likely already support 64-bit file offsets (i.e., Large File Support). By recompiling these for a 64-bit architecture, you change the two 32-bit operations being done on these 64-bit offsets to one 64-bit operation - a win. Thus, migrating to 64-bit datatypes is not a loss in all cases.
But, when you don't need the full 64 bits, just blindly using a 64-bit datatype can degrade the performance of your application needlessly.
[ 02-23-2003: Message edited by: HoserHead ]</p>
<strong>Not true, by a long shot. Your thesis only holds if the CPU is upgraded but nothing else--only data beholden to the 64-bit integer will be affected as you say. Not to mention it is more likely those applications you would already compare against are using a 64-bit long already and would see little or no real change by recoding them to 64-bit int's.
The system itself will still be byte driven, and likely be optimized with appropriate data paths for the CPU's expected data throughput. More bytes through a wider pipe isn't neccecarily slower, and in many cases may be faster. You can't make your kind of assessments in a total system vacuum where everything is equal with current machines. A statement or two based on those assumptions may be theoretically accurate, but ultimately worthless as overly-narrow theory and ever widening practice follow diverging paths.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
In general I agree with him, however, although the difference in performance of 32-bit and 64-bit code on the same processor will be quite small (at the most just a few %). The difference is primarily that pointers are stored as 8 bytes instead of 4 so any place you store lots of pointers means you have to touch twice as much memory to use them all. Consider, for example, that all C++ vtables will be twice as big, and all objects with a vtable pointer grow by 4 bytes. Walking a table of pointers to objects touches twice as many cache lines, etc. The uses of 64-bit integers are so rare that it probably isn't a factor, unless the programmers just start using them for the heck of it (i.e. sloppy programmer syndrome), in which case it will slow the 64-bit machine down for the same reason unless 64-bit integers were required and used on the 32-bit version as well.
Internally to the OS the VMM page table scheme has to change and expand to accomodate very large address spaces which will also use more memory and thus cache, further impacting performance.
<strong>I'm not exactly sure how FCP handles things currently, but I have experienced the digital molasses of jumping around from sub-sequence to sub-sequence, only to hear a minor thrash-o-rama before seeing the video ...
</strong><hr></blockquote>
That is probably a combination of not enough RAM (does it have 2 GB at least?), too slow a processor, too slow an FSB, too slow a disk, and software that isn't being terribly smart about how it loads data. Having a 64-bit address space isn't going to help you as much as you think -- the data still has to come from disk in the first place, and if the software doesn't write it back quickly then you're going to be awfully unhappy if you have a software, hardware, or power failure. The same 32-bit app running on a 970 with a decent RAID and 2 GB of RAM will likely do a much better job of it.