PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

In this months sound on sound martin walker does an article looking @ vista for musicians.. not on the website yet but i'm sure it'll be up in the next few days (i got the mag through the post )
its an interesting piece, he kinda sits on the fence as, for the moment at least , there are only a limited number of programs that have full compatibility and make full use of the supposed advantages (sonar is leading the way at the moment - 64 bit etc..)
One more interesting thing to note is that while home premium and ultimate have windows new media centre, vista business doesn't, so for musos its gonna be one of the 2 - home premium or ultimate, so at least that choice should be easier than previously thought...
Personally, without getting into the ethics of funding either apple or m$ more cash, which is kind of inevitable, its nice to look at the new platform with positivity, as a definite step forward, that in the long run certainly will benefit us musicians.
I know that Jimmy V will be drooling at the idea of having up to 128 Gb of ram for his sample libraries... Shame there arent any mobos that support that much!! ..... yet!

pseudojazzer wrote:.... that have full compatibility and make full use of the supposed advantages (sonar is leading the way at the moment - 64 bit etc..)
....
I know that Jimmy V will be drooling at the idea of having up to 128 Gb of ram for his sample libraries... Shame there arent any mobos that support that much!! ..... yet!

well, there's 64 bit integer processing on one hand and 64 bit memory adressing on the other - both are in no way related.

The first one would be appreciated by both CPU manufacturers and compiler writers, as it would allow to get rid of the floating point processing unit most of the time.
It would result in a straightened (software) design and a significant performance increase, since mode switching of the CPU and register save/restore plus format conversions are avoided.

This could be implemented under any OS and on any CPU, though it wouldn't make much sense on a C64. But in theory it's possible - or why did Commodore name the machine '64' back then ?

No such math lib currently exists and if it eventually does, there will be a ton of stuff either have to be adapted or rewritten. Don't even think of 'tricks' smart programmers might have included in core routines to 'optimize' the current environment...

cheers Tom

I don't see a big advantage regarding increased memory space due to 64 bit adressing.
To load 128 GB into memory (via FireWire) would probably take at least one hour or so (guessing from copying a larger drive). Even if an internal one is faster, there's still a significant amount of time with such data chunks.

Now what's happening when saving intermediate results ?
Write the whole portion en bloc ? probably not that smart...
So it ends in something known as 'disk streaming' anyway which we have since the days of Win98...
But nevertheless - everything counts in large amounts, according to marketing

cheers, Tom