SolidWorks 64-bit

Beware of jumping on the 64-bit bandwagon prematurely. Not many drivers are out there yet, and 64-bit drivers WILL largely be necessary.

But BTW, SolidWorks SHOULD work just fine with the 64-bit flavor of XP being released just now, as well as should all other 32-bit applications except for those that depend upon 32-bit drivers (which may not work with the OS). It's just that SolidWorks Corp isn't promising to SUPPORT SolidWorks on XP-64 until they've done a couple more service packs.

'Sporky'

Dave wrote:

And, expect the software to be very buggy. Although there will be programming languages to generate 64 bit code, robust debugging tools will be lagging behind a ways.

can someone tell me where abouts that announcement is on the SW site.. I can't see it anywhere..

Is anyone really in need of 64 bit SW's. Are you hitting limits on 2GB of memory?

Dave wrote:

"Are you hitting limits on 2GB of memory?" Yes, all the time. That why the 3GB switch patch helps. Best Regards, Devon T. Sowell

Sorry, Devon I should have mentioned extending XP to /3GB (you do limit parts of the OS).

Just asking because I've been hoping the code would get better (cleaner) so we won't need more memory capabilities.

Dev> "Are you hitting limits on 2GB of memory?"

Hi Dave,

I can't find this article on SW site. Could you tell me where you saw it? I want to show it to our IT guys.

Thanks,

Dan

Mark,

I would agree about waiting for stability. For the moment, let's say that has been accomplished. Remember that this is only and assumption for the sake of argument.

Why would an ordinary SW user want to go 64 anytime soon?

Running a 64 bit application on a 64 bit machine with sufficient memory (say 8Gb) will allow certain features not to crash SW. In particular, if you have ever run the Patbench benchmark you will know you can run SW out of memory by creating large patterns in a part. IMHO this type of crash may be responsible for more than one unexpected crash in SW.

If you run PDMWorks locally, I think 64 bit will help as well if you have a large vault because PDMWorks keeps its database in memory.

64 Bit will probably also help PhotoWorks with it's insatiable appetite for memory. For Photoworks we are probably looking at dual/quad processor systems when we get renderings using the memory 64 bit can supply. So there will be quite an investment in hardware to take advantage of this.

CosmosWorks will definitely benefit from 64 bit and multiprocessing. Another case of large hardware investments. The same is true of CosmosMotion and FloWorks. The CAE side would definitely benefit.

The one thing I don't think 64 bit will do is to make SW run any faster in the area of regeneration. It might, but I am not holding my breath on this front. This is a performance issue that resides more in software than hardware.

Once upon a time SW did run on 64 bit. I remember testing TriStar Alpha systems with SW 96 and SW97. Back then the reason was to get performance and a gigabyte of Ram was unthinkable and unaffordable.

Paul,

WinNT4.0 Alpha was 32bit windows, running on a 64 bit RISC processor. The MIPS version was the same.

All of the published benchmarks, for Alpha, were run under DEC's propriatery

64 bit UNIX. This was the OS that the Alpha was originally designed to run, and was also the reason for the inflated (deceptive) performance numbers. The RISC (still 32bit) version of NT3.51 and NT4 was developed on a MIPS based machine (I think it was NEC). DEC threw in with their Alpha, after the fact, just to sell some hardware (bad times for DEC)

We had four or five of em back in 96-97. Mhz for Mhz the Pentiums of the day were faster at most things, (I ran them side by side), exept disk access. The Alpha's came standard with fast-wide SCSI. Guys would argue with me till they were blue in the face on this subject. I guess I would too if I'd just spent 8-$10,000.00 on something. I'd will it to be faster even if it was just in my own mind.

Regards

Mark

Now that I didn't know. All along I thought the whole deal was 64 bit throughout. I believe at the time we opted for a screaming 166Mhz Pentium with 256Mb ram.

Paul,

When I first started there, I had an Alpha on my desk. At home, I had a Pentium Pro. My home machine was noticably faster. I brought it in too show them. Having just laid out mega bucks for all these machines, they weren't too happy with what they saw. Something else that they failed to consider was that there wasn't much complimentary software available in native Alpha. DEC had an emulator that would run X86 code at about 30% speed, but if the software used a dongle, you couldn't run it. This meant that I couldn't run Mastercam. It was a very expensive mistake overall, the Alpha's were phased out over the next couple of years, and replaced with Intel machines. The company was still making payments on these white elephants long after they were put on shelves to collect dust.

About two years ago we finally put them in the dumpster

Regards

Mark

Darn, there went some really fast Samba file servers.

Mark Mossberg wrote:

couldn't run

Mark,

I walked into HSC ( a local Electronics surplus place up here)a few weeks back, and they had some SGI Indigos on the racks. $100 ea. I almost bought a pair to use as bookends. Nice sentimental purple bookends.

clay

clay wrote: (snip)

I managed to unload my last SGI (used for I-DEAS) about 5 years ago when there was a still a small market for them. IIRC, I got $1000 for what was once a hot system, about 5% of the purchase price. :(

Art

SCSI drives for $100 ea. And you passed it up?

Didn't even bother check what was inside, I have lots of sentimental hardware laying about in my museum of bad investments.

Remember the Weitek Co-processor? I've got three of them. Well, actually, two single chip modules, and one HUGE full length periferral card version multichip monster that was on the cover of Byte magazine

1987. I ended up with it as my commission for a major CadKey sale that I orchestrated, and took over a year to finalize. Cadkey/Compaq dropped support for the module, in the next version it turns out, before the customer actually installed the system. So rather than getting paid in desperately needed college $$$$ I got this nice paperweight instead.

ca

Stock options would have been a better deal. 8~)