On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Marc Lehmann wrote: > On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 07:59:16PM +0200, Ketil Froyn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > I am buying a new computer which I will use for photo editing with the > > GIMP. I am considering an AMD Athlon 64 processor, because with the 64 bit > > registers I am thinking many operations should be faster > > In addition to the other answers you received: the speed increase does not > usually come because a processor is 64 bit, but becaus eof other > architectural changes.
Yes, usually, but I think the GIMP could actually utilize the 64 bit operations. See below... > All 64 bit architectures (most common today is amd64) feature more > registers than the old x86 cpus had, which makes some speed increases > possible. Also, other addressing modes and a better architecture are firther > advantages that make code go faster. > > > so, would it do any good? If not, is this being worked on, and is there an > > approximate ETA? > > Gimp is written in C, so it's mostly a question of just recompiling it for > another architecture. gcc already does a fairly good job for amd64, so you > can expect a speed increase over 32-bit code between 5% and 60% (20% is > more typical). Thanks for the responses. I guess one major limiting factor could be the types used internally by the GIMP. For instance, if it does operations on uint32 type variables internally, I'd think the compiler needs to be pretty clever to make use of 64 bit operations. But now I'm getting into deep waters here here...:) I was hoping someone in the know could confirm whether there's any point going to 64 bit to make the GIMP faster, rather than just getting a faster 32 bit CPU. Ketil Froyn [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ketil.froyn.name/ _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
