64-bit...who cares?

Okay, I care. When I came onboard at Intel seven years ago there was this cool 64-bit processor called Itanium. Man, I thought, that could be a killer workstation! Unfortunately...the Itanium was abducted by the server aliens before I even had a chance to hang my Softimage and Alias posters up in my cube (okay, I'm dating myself here with Alias - at least I didn't say Poweranimator :) ).

From an animator's point of view (and anyone doing multi-track recording, another passion and major time-sink of mine) those extra bits mean more RAM access, and more RAM access means I can work with bigger scenes, or add more tracks and effects to a song. Mark Schoennagel, Demo God from Softimage put it best the first time he rendered their Club-Bot scene on one of our demo Xeon machines last year. The first part was "Holy - " and I can't print the second part...anyway - he liked it.

Add multiple cores to all that RAM and you can do more of everything at once. My favorite thing is tweaking an animation at the same time I'm setting off renders in the background - and NOT getting a performance hit. Sweet!


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We need 64-bit CPUs for really only two reasons. Unlike the jump from 8-bits to 16-bits and 16-bits to 32-bits, the jump to 64-bits won't really boost arithmetic capability for most applications.

Almost everything a computer deals with is bigger than 256, so having a 16-bit CPU saves a lot of multiple operations. Many, many things computers deal with are larger than 65,536, so having a 32-bit CPU saves a lot of multiple operations too. But very few things involve numbers larger than 4 billion, so going from 32-bits to 64-bits won't save a lot of time in most operations. (Exceptions would include encryption, image processing, perhaps video processing.)

However, more than 4GB of RAM is going to be realistic for many computers in a very short amount of time. We'll need 64-bit pointers to do that right. Also, we're coming up on 2038, when the number of seconds since the epoch won't fit in a 32-bit signed integer. So we'll need 64-bits for time operations.

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We will have 64 bit CPU's for the simple fact that they are available. Ten years ago who would ever have thought we would have Terabyte HDD's?

Sergey Kostrov's picture

>>...those extra bits mean more RAM access, and more RAM access means I can work with bigger scenes...

I really want to solve a problem with a 2GB limit for a 32-bit application on a 32-bit Windows platform without AWE. After that I'll forget about 64-bit platforms for a couple of more years.

I'm not against of 64-bit platforms. I simply would like to mention that it is not so easy to move everything from a 32-bit to 64-bit.