CPU: 64-bit vs 32-bit DualCore

Dear madz:

I just recently made the jump to 64 bit windows land. I predominately do nonlinear FEA. To me, the largest motivating factor was to gain larger addressable memory space. 32 bit windows (XP pro) has a per process memory limitation of just about 3 gigabytes. Many of my analyses would run out of core space, thus necessitating paging and swapping which really slows down the FEA solutions. There are a few things you may want to consider:

- do 64 bit versions of your software exist?, if not the 32 bit apps will run, but in an emulated mode which could be slower than the original 32 bit platform. I know that Solidworks has 64 bit versions as well as many of the FEA codes.

- If you need the increased memory, can you afford it?

Good luck

Thank you, you gave good points to think about.

Best regards, m

Ray Mandeville wrote:

Also, be sure any hardware needing them has 64 bit drivers available as well, starting with your printer.

-- Ed Ruf Lifetime AMA# 344007 ( snipped-for-privacy@EdwardG.Ruf.com)

What's Postscript got to do with 64-bit? :-)

Err, regarding number 2, dual core != HT. Dual core means two "real" processing cores, while HT means 1 real core pretending to be 2. Time has shown that HT leads to actual performance gains in fairly rare cases. I'm not aware of any dual core chips with HT.

All that being, said, why choose? Athlon X2 and the higher end Opteron

2xx chips are both of the above. If you *have* to buy Intel, well, sorry to hear that.

You don't mention your OS. I have no experience with 64 bit Windows, so I can't speak to its stability. I have heard rumors that running 32 bit apps under it is less than seamless.

I do run several of the above apps on 64 bit Linux, and they run

*extremely* well. And even 32 bit apps enjoy a speedup running under 64 bit Linux, due to the extra registers available on the CPU in 64 bit mode.

Joshua Baker-LePain wrote on 3/30/2006 5:00 AM:

Pentium D 840, 955, 965 Extreme Edition:

core with hyperthreading)

:) Lance

*****

I sit corrected. Thanks.

Those EE chips are a bit pricy, though, aren't they? And power hungry.