What's the Deal with 64 bit?

Ok. I can deny you no longer. Since last summer with the release of the G5 and later with the release of Intel’s x64 chips, I’ve been getting inundated with questions about it -- mostly "When", but lots of "Whys" and a few "How’s". Hopefully I can answer most of your questions here.

Lets start at the beginning shall we? First off, 64 bit computing is not all that new. In the server side of things 64 bit has been around since the late 1990’s with the introduction of the Itanium (now dubbed the Itanic for numerous reasons). There have been products offered by MIPS and DEC alpha as well. 64Bit never really became a buzzword in the general workstation community until the G5 was introduced last year, followed closely by the AMD Opteron and finally the Intel Xeon64.

The reason I’ve put off this article for so long is the fact that there has yet to be any 64 bit threaded applications in our industry, and “less than beta version” options for operating systems. But that’s going to be changing very quickly in the next few months.

Now a little bit on what 64 bit computing is and what it means to you. Sorry if I get too geeky, but it’s a hard concept to explain simply. I’m going to give my best.

Simply put, 1bit is a 1 or a 0 that is either stored or processed by a transistor. 32 and 64 bit are what is referred to as the CPU bit rating. 32 bit has been the norm for the last 10 years or so when Intel introduced their 386 platform. A bit count intern refers to the greatest amount of bits a CPU can handle in a single cycle, roughly 2 to the power of the bit rating. In a 32 bit scenario it comes to 4.3 billion bits. Anything more than that requires a second clock cycle to complete the calculation. Which, lets face it, your time can be spent more efficiently at your local bar rather than watching something render.

A 64bit CPU can handle 2 to the power of 64, which is a number none of us can pronounce..Alex looked it up as 4.6 quintillion, a number with six comma places or just a tad more than the total number located in Bill gates bank account. The time it took to figure out that number would be much more efficiently processed in 64 bits.

The other item directly affected by 64 bit computing is the amount of memory the CPU can access in any given cycle. As you all know, OSs have, until recently, only been able to handle 4 GB of memory in the best of circumstances. But for the most part you can only allocate 2 GB to any given 32 bit application. However, in 64 bitville, total system memory limits are in the 1000TB (terabyte) range using 4 GB of memory per 32-bit app.

This is extremely important for all you animators and compositors that rely on RAM previews and pre-render shading. Once you get native 64 bit versions of your favorite Ram hogging apps they will be able to take advantage of the whole thing.

When this stuff breaks (probably around Q1 next year) no one will be able to afford the amount of RAM that can be put into a machine anyway. The going standard will be 8 to 16 GB memory in a workstation.

Anyway that’s the general idea. It explains a little bit of why everyone is so freaked about it. The biggest problem with 64 bit in the last year, and before, is that no one wants to spend the money to develop it.

Basically they enable anything natively in 64 bit and require a complete recode from the bottom up. That takes a lot of smart people working long hours, and contrary to popular belief smart people cost a lot of money. The software developers didn’t want to rewrite their code until the hardware was ready, and the hardware guy’s didn’t want to develop until there was software--hence the Itanic. Nowadays we’ve run out of space and something needs to be done. This once again brings us to the precipice.

At the April Intel developer forum, Microsoft announced the release date for XP64, which is now already late. Apple set Tiger of for early next year. We’ll see. Linux may make more of an impact in the workstation class. I would love to see that, but again, we’ll see.

Slowly but surely well see a trickling of software. I’m going to bet Photoshop will be the first native 64-bit offering. Right now this very moment all we are getting is some extended memory addressing for our 32 apps and OSs--which is better than nothing. Any advance in technology gets me out of my chair.

But don’t despair, you won’t be waiting long. Because where we are heading in this industry is going to make this a necessity.

So where is the industry heading Cutter???..Where??.. and what’s going to get the suits to hire more nerds?? What else--oodles and oodles of money!

In a very short period of time the whole world is going to make the change over to high definition imaging of various qualities and beyond. Everything is going to be HD from Television to VD’s—pushed forward by the most effective driving force of all technology, porn.

Faster, higher quality porn is truly the underlying force of everything from VHS to broadband internet. HD is no exception. As all of you know HD is very very big and pushes the limits of even the fastest machine. If we are going to be able to handle this kind of image while continuing to deliver fast content results, faster and more efficient workstations are a necessity.

Come Christmastime 2005, we will be seeing the first HD DVD players hit the market and the first HD DVD’s. This is going to involve an awful lot of encoding, resampling, recompiling and rendering. On the current workstations this would probably take years rather than days.

HD is rapidly changing the way we view the world. So don’t worry, it’s going to happen and happen fast. Of course I, your friendly neighborhood integrator/super geek will be there to help you make the right decision.

Cutter Stevens is the Technical Director for DV411. Email Cutter for quotes, comments, questions at cutter (@dv411.com)