Bob Cain wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:
Bob Cain wrote:
wrote:
There are performance benefits especially when doing
64bit
computations on a 64bit processor.
Most certainly, but what's in question is the relevance
of
that to a DAW.
Right now, it's totally irrelevant. But I bet it turns
out to make
it easier to design good fast reverbs. Double-precision
floats can
be a good thing for reverb simulation.
I may be wrong but I think that FP units have 64 bit wide
data paths even in 32 bit machines.
I believe you're right.
In and of itself, 64 bit is really about integers and
addresses.
Surprisingly, we're getting to the point where 32 bit
addressing is starting to look a little tight. The largest
32 bit integer is about 8 billion, which corresponds to the
ever-so-common 8 gigabyte addressing.
Right now I'm building customer machines with 0.5 and 1
gigabyte of RAM, so 8 gigabytes of RAM is quite easy to see
on the horizon. In fact I'm contemplating building a 2 GB
machine today.
Building machines with very large amounts of real memory is
stimulated by the fact that CPU speed has long been
outpacing hard drive speed. If you really want a 3+ GHz
machine to exploit its potential processing power, you don't
run much directly off the hard drive.
Since large amounts of RAM are being used to cache hard
drives that keep getting larger and larger, computer real
memory size has to in some sense, keep up with increases in
the size of the hard drive.
Computers have to work with virtual address spaces, and even
8 GB addressing is too small when the address space is being
used to work with an entire database. Again, very large
databases are facilitated by large hard drives as well being
demanded by increased use of graphics and imaging.