Ted,
I'm new to thread so forgive me if this was posted already.
Cosmo
{snip} Revolutionary Rumblings Underfoot
Techno-advances set to shake things up
by Charlie White
Page 1 of 1
Put your ear next to the digital video editing railroad tracks, and listen
along with me. What do you hear? Rumblings. Big, loud, basso-profundo,
earth-shaking sounds, telling you that something is coming down the track
that's going to shake things up, big time. What is this beast, on its way to
rock our world? Read this and find out.
It's the beginning of a revolution, signaling the next era in computing,
that's what. When the computing world switched from 8 bit to 16 bit,
everything changed. Same thing happened when software and hardware jumped
the barrier to 32 bit. But these leaps were painful, and slow. There were
lots of software modifications necessary to make it all work.
Now it's time to take the next leap, to the 64-bit world. But this time,
it's going to be different. It's going to be a smooth transition this time,
because AMD's new Opteron chip, to be rolled out in early April of this year
(2003), is backward-compatible with 32 bit software. It's not just going to
emulate the 32-bit instruction set., either. It's going to be able to run
32-bit applications faster than the 32 bit chips we use today. So think of
it this way -- a highway with twice as many lanes can move twice as many
cars, and those same cars can run on these wider roads, even faster than
they do on the narrower roads. It's like that with computers, too -- when
you have more bandwidth, you can move a lot more data. This is important
when you're talking about working with video, particularly high definition
video with its tremendous amounts of data.
We've had our ear on those railroad tracks I mentioned earlier for some time
now. And what we've heard is remarkable. Intrepid testers and developers of
both software and hardware, working with compositing, editing and moving
huge amounts of video data, have noticed some exciting things about this new
chip and the data paths associated with it. For one, when you port 32-bit
mathematical routines over to 64 bit, with this Opteron chip you get an
immediate 400 per cent increase in speed. On integer based-operations you
get a 400% increase, and on floating point operations you get a 600%
increase. Yikes! That's astonishing. {snip} |
