blog: you can keep your 64 bits

[nikos]

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at:
www.zabkat.com/blog/11Apr10-64-bit-windows.htm

[Kilmatead]

You were probably the extra-hairy neanderthal who didn't want to leave the cave, weren't you?  Why chase meat when you can eat wood-lice?

The per-process memory limit has also been lifted from 2GB.  This doesn't matter to small utilities like x2, but for video editing, or video-game developers this is a significant improvement.

With graphics cards routinely in the 1GB to 1.5GB memory range these days, you won't have much leftover (allocatable) system memory to actually use.  Hell, my mouse alone has a 32MB memory.  (Why, I do not know.  Yeah, the physical mouse, not drivers.)

64 bit capable processors (which can also run in 32 bit mode for backward compatibility)"

It's not a matter of switching "modes" like some type of mutual exclusivity, it's simply changes to the instruction set.  You're thinking of the BIOS virtualization switch - that only applies to Intel, and only to virtualization, not day to day.

Most of the programs and software tools we own are still 32 bit executables

Speak for yourself.

It is also common sense that 64 bit programs and drivers are also relatively more unstable

Prove it.  Don't speculate in supposition.

Not many people know that when you browse the internet on 64 bit windows you actually use the 32 bit internet explorer, and now you know why!

Only by default, the x64 version is always available.  What are IE plug-ins?  I thought they were called crutches.

Aside from the usual whining and complaining from reactionary Luddites, x64 is fairly painless now.  There's a theory that says MS made an awful mistake by not making Win7 x64 only, as the one thing (and I do mean the one thing) Vista got right was its x64 implementation (xp x64 was a joke).  What caused problems under Vista (x86 and x64) was the attitude of developers who couldn't figure out how to make a profit from writing new drivers, so they didn't bother (except Creative sound-cards, where they intentionally disabled things to make people buy new equipment - and thanks to community-types like Daniel K they paid the price for it).

Would you trust a company who's vice president of corporate communications wrote that whether or not it cripples its Vista drivers is a "business decision that only we have the right to make."?

Don't blame x64 vagaries, your corporate world is a greater threat to progress.  Linux, if I'm informed enough, has been happily humming along in x64-land for quite awhile with not many ruffles (I could be wrong on this, though).

MS just doesn't have the cojones to force the issue, which would sort out the "confusing backwards compatibility mess" once and for all and simplify everything.

Enjoy your wood-lice while you can.  Crunch crunch.  Mmm, tasty.

And aside from the hours you've spent making x2 compatible for quarrelsome forum-users, exactly how much non-virtual (virtualization is no where near 100% reliable yet) time have you spent actually using x64 in the real world?  Any?  

Seriously.  Any?  At all?

[Kilmatead]

Actually, all gripes about your blatant inexperience aside , did you ever get your virtual environment working "right" under x86?  You were having problems with that, as I recall, you couldn't even decide which software you liked...

[nikos]

suit yourself mr early adopter
types like you are responsible for the senseless exponential growth in energy demand. In a few years i'll be laughing as you try to power your monster with solar panels

[Kilmatead]

You and your tree-hugging philosophy.  Bah.

Actually, considering virtually all new chips are x64 these days, and the transistor manufacturing die is shrinking (32nm becoming the norm from 65 to 55 to 45 to 32 in just the last year), energy consumption (voltage and excess heat) of these parts is dropping dramatically.

So your puny laptop may have a few more beeps left in it as I kick sand in its USB ports.

And indeed, as virtually all chip manufacturing is x64 now, what's the point in being a late-adopter?

[RickyF]

This past week I edited and rendered lengthy videos for broadcast. My source video came from two HD cameras and was over 52GB. The video was produced on an Intel i7-920 machine with 12GB RAM in Windows 7 64-bit. I used Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and Adobe Encore CS4. Both these products seem to take advantage of the i7's 8 virtual cores and the system's plentiful RAM.

I could not have accomplished this as fast or possibly at all in the 32-bit version of Windows, with effective RAM limitations of about 3.5GB. Assuming I could have used a 32-bit system the conclusion of the project would have been delayed. The rendering, which took 6½ hours on the 64-bit system, would have taken many hours or days more if it could have been accomplished at all.

I am all for 64-bit systems after this. I see no reason to go backwards.

[Kilmatead]

The video was produced on an Intel i7-920 machine with 12GB RAM in Windows 7 64-bit. I used Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and Adobe Encore CS4. Both these products seem to take advantage of the i7's 8 virtual cores and the system's plentiful RAM.

I hate to mention this, but in the interests of full disclosure, as far as I know Adobe CS4 does not contain x64 applications, so despite your 12GB of ram, you probably didn't use most of it, unless everything was multi-tasked (even then, two x86 applications == 4GB of ram at the most).

You also don't gain any noticeable speed benefit from x64, contrary to popular belief.

i7's are very nice creatures though.  At the end of the day, they're still only quad-cores, so 8 threads are somewhat moot.  In all honesty you could have used all the same applications on an x86 OS with 3GB of RAM and any OC'd C2D Quad and accomplished the same thing in the same amount of time.

When Adobe CS does manage to matriculate to x64 (CS5 PS already is, I think, but that's the only one), then perhaps benchmarks will improve, but as of now, it's just propaganda.  Sorry about that.  

(Score one for Nikos' Luddite side.)

P.S.  I'd love it if someone proved me wrong about this, but I won't hold my breath.  Hardware propaganda sounds great and has a great sales pitch, but the real world is another story.  An x86 application on an x64 OS won't flip burgers any better on an i7 12GB rig.  (Processor numbers and architecture bandwidth are the only things which count here, not bit-design.)  

[RickyF]

@Kilmatead

I disagree with your conclusions.

Here is what Adobe says,

"Rendering AVCHD natively is very CPU- and memory-intensive, and often with memory-based tasks, you see a sharp drop off in performance when the system starts having to swap out memory to disk. This is why we recommend 64-bit systems for CS4. We have split up the application into multiple processes, which will allow you to use far more than the usual limit for 32-bit applications. ..."

http://digitalcontentproducer.com/affor ... 64bit_1208

Have you ever worked on very large video projects?

[RickyF]

Further to the difference between 32bit and 64bit with Adobe CS4 video products from the above mentioned article,

Rendering out to Blu-ray compatible MPEG-2 took 68 minutes on the Windows [32bit] workstation...in the same AVCHD test, the 64-bit xw8600 rendered in 8:58 (min:sec), an order of magnitude faster than the Windows 32-bit workstation. That got my attention.

[RickyF]

And even more,

In a press release issued on Nov. 20, 2008, Adobe announced CS4 version 4.0.1 and listed the following as one of the key benefits:

"Faster performance and responsiveness, with full support for 64-bit computing platforms to accelerate compute-intensive postproduction tasks. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.0.1 is architected to take advantage of the additional memory available in 64-bit systems."

[RickyF]

@Kilmatead

QED

[Kilmatead]

We have split up the application into multiple processes [...] Adobe Premier Pro CS4 version 4.0.1 is architected to take advantage of the additional memory available in 64-bit systems.

Interesting.  Thanks for that, I wondered why they never released any proper x64 applications.

Except it's far from QED.

Notice the wording: Multiple Processes is different than Multiple Threading.

And notice the hardware: A xw8600 workstation uses 2 Quad Xeon processors, i.e., 8 single-threaded cores.  (This is different from your i7 dual-threaded quad by the hardware bandwidth architecture I mentioned before, in case you're interested.  External BUSes in the workstation, internal for you.)

What they did was cheat: probably the most memory intensive operation is video encoding.  Fair enough, that's what we're talking about here.  Multi-tasking out a memory intensive function makes perfect sense, and does indeed benefit from extra RAM and a x64 OS to allocate it.

So, de facto, they simply spawned 7 32-bit threads of Handbrake.  Each process is 2GB max, 16GB RAM, minus about 650MB for Windows to whistle at the girls walking by = 8 threads/8 cores minus some for system overhead.

Except, of course, it's not as efficient as Handbrake, as that is a x64 native process, which means it alone could call up 16GB of RAM just for fun.

And, as it's not multi-threaded, it suffers from the law of diminishing returns: 8 independent single threaded cores (2 quads) gives you access to 16GB so it's efficient on paper, as far as it goes.  But 32GB or 64GB of RAM would offer no improvement, as the process ceiling would have been hit.  Handbrake wouldn't suffer that problem.  Splitting hairs?  Maybe.  But a few years ago no one would have had 16GB of RAM in a glorified desktop.

If all you're interested in doing is video encoding then that's great.  But CS4 is supposed to be about editing, etc, isn't it?  Very few 32-bit editors pretend to keep whole files in memory at once, so it's still swapping.  No number of "extra processes" could help that.

My point?  Simply that it's a missed opportunity by relying on hardware for the speed boosts (in conjunction with extra memory, of course), not taking "full" advantage of the x64 OS proper, which is what we're talking about.

So it works.  But it's cheating.  And still rooted in x86 architecture.

I concede that when I wrote:

...you could have used all the same applications on an x86 OS with 3GB of RAM and any OC'd C2D Quad and accomplished the same thing in the same amount of time

I was wrong.

In this case, despite using Adobe software, you would see a significant increase under an x64 system.  But only for one very specific function.  Nothing else.

It's woefully short of what "could have been" if Adobe pulled its finger out and wrote bespoke OS oriented applications.

Close, but no QED.

Have you ever worked on very large video projects?

In fact I have, which is why I dislike them. Hardware still makes all the difference though.

It's the propaganda I hate.  The only thing Adobe gained by spawning processes is not even as good as one little 4.66MB chunk of x64 freeware.  Lazy buggers.  How much do their licenses cost again?

[Kilmatead]

And even more,

In a press release issued on Nov. 20, 2008, Adobe announced CS4 version 4.0.1 and listed the following as one of the key benefits:

"Faster performance and responsiveness, with full support for 64-bit computing platforms to accelerate compute-intensive postproduction tasks. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 version 4.0.1 is architected to take advantage of the additional memory available in 64-bit systems."

See the above post as to why is this 98% propaganda, 1.9% marketing hyperbole, and .1% true (postproduction).

[Tuxman]

For me, 64 bit would not have any reasonable advantage either. My applications consume max. ~ 2 GB of RAM, I don't do CAD or something. Call me a Neanderthaler, too!

[Kilmatead]

For me, 64 bit would not have any reasonable advantage either.

In this "transition" period, it isn't a matter of convincing anyone of advantages.  It's a matter of inevitability, and who's just being reactionary.  Which is precisely why

I guess I should try having both versions available... what an annoying mess!

The reactionary Neanderthals are responsible for the "annoying mess" - not MS - for once.