On Jan 11, 2006, at 8:42 PM, Anand Keathley wrote:
So, Macintel. Better performance for a dollar is good for most all of us. So Macintel Minis, 'Books and maybe even iMacs doesn't bother me. However, two things do. The Yonah chip is 32-bit. Not critical until you get to heavy video processing.
No...video processing doesn't depend on 64-bits. It depends on floating point performance. Video processing doesn't gain anything from increased memory space. What it DOES gain from is a fast CPU and fast memory and i/o bus, neither of which have anything to do with the added memory space. Being able to go to 8GB of ram does help if you're loading gigantic sequences into memory.
This is needed when creating movies but also with while viewing highly compressed movies and/or games. Compression will become even more important with time.
64 bits doesn't get you anything with compression, either. As above, it depends on the FP performance, and FP only.
Here is what Apple says about 64-bit processing.
Yes, that 64 bits gets you a vast flat address space. This is critical for really big things like aerodynamic simulations, bioinformatics, protein modelling, databases, etc, but less important for things like Photoshop and FCP or Shake.
Increased memory space is the ONLY benefit those apps get from moving from 32 to 64 bits.
This is, in fact, the same thing we got when we moved from 16 to 32 bits. That is was such a big deal then is that we'd been crammed up against the 1 MB memory barrier of a 16-bit processor, coupled with an exponential increase in CPU and memory performance in the same timeframe.
That there wasn't such an exponential leap in performance when the G5s were released is because there wasn't a corresponding improvement in CPU and memory performance.
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