Gone back to the dark side.

[AlexN]

I remember having one of the Original hyperthreaded S478 P4 2.4C's back in the day... it was a good chip, but the only piece of software that even recognized it was windows task manager, it showed 2 cpu graphs in the performance monitor... That was the only use of the 2nd logical core... These days with 64bit OS's and many programs supporting multi-threading, a dual core/quad core processor is a really handy bit of gear...

I still think my next system is going to be a dual - quad core box... Pure processing power. 2x quad core Intel Xeon's with 32gb of ram should pump out the photoshop work without breaking a sweat!! Back in the day I had a dual Xeon 2 400Mhz server at home... it was the noisiest computer I've ever owned, but it was the coolest thing I have ever owned (Until the Astro-toys that is)

Ahh nostalgia..

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Originally Posted by AlexN

... Back in the day I had a dual Xeon 2 400Mhz server at home... it was the noisiest computer I've ever owned, but it was the coolest thing I have ever owned (Until the Astro-toys that is)

Ahh nostalgia..

Nostalgia! LOL!

Alex - I worked for IBM as a mainframe systems engineer in 1982, when I opened a box in our Kent St. Sydney Head Office, containing the very, very first IBM PC that had ever landed in the country.

I looked at it, and at a fellow engineer looking at it, and we both turned to each other and said... "what a silly little machine - it'll never catch on".

Now that's nostalgia!

[avandonk]

As far as I can work out for sheer grunt you cannot beat an i7. The on board die memory controller is the clincher for me. IP 64 bit is multithreaded and or uses multicores. Registar is still 32 bit but is very memory intensive.

I have not been able to make it swap ram to disk or saturate the processors yet. Give me some time. This CPU also overclocks well but I wont bother yet.

As a small example a Richardson Lucy enhancement that took 1.5 hrs on my old machine with a 6.5k (170MB) pixels wide image only took 12 minutes with a 9k (250MB) pixels wide image!

If you want to go down memory lane my first computer was a PDP8 with 2k of memory.in 1968.

In the past at CSIRO we had many very expensive super computers. My desktop now leaves them all for dead. They will not let me play with the current real super computers.

I ran all my lab (6) computers in command code unix. What power hey! Three or four keystrokes would set off a major chain reaction!

Bert

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Set up a RAM disk Bert - and then watch it freaking fly.

[AlexN]

Yeah... RAM disks are awesome! I've got my OS on a ram disk... Unfortunately its bottlenecked by the SATA bus... They really need to start producing motherboards with a few DIMM slots for RAM disk, and the usual 4/6 for RAM...

My RAM disk is a PCIe board with 4 DIMMs on it, its got 8gb of RAM in it.. Its then got a lead that goes from the PCIe card to the SATA controller on the motherboard... The SATA bus is still a fair bit slower than the DDR2 modules, and therfore, bottlenecks the RAM disks potential performance. however it still destroyes the performance I achieved with 2x73gb SCSI HDD's in RAID 0...

[avandonk]

My last computer had a ram (4GB ) disk otherwise it was very slow for memory intensive tasks.

If my memory at 12GB has not swapped yet I cannot see the point.

I may get a SSD for just for the swap file and wait until it fails and then just replace it.

Bert

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

In reality you're correct here Bert. The limiting factor of Photoshop performance these days is DRAM bus bandwidth, not CPU. Allocating RAM to a separately-managed pool such as a RAM disk merely steals it from what's available directly to Photoshop to fool around in at lightning speed.

With 12Gb you'll probably never hit any paging limit thresholds in real life - unless you try to stack a couple of thousand 12Mp images at once. Just remember - 12Gb is NOT a lot of RAM when you consider Photoshops buffers. Rule of thumb is to have 4-5 times the amount of physical RAM you think you need to open a file and perform tasks on it. You need to cater for undo history, snapshot, pattern buffers, not to mention room for the file itself.

Go to your Info pallette options and turn on "efficiency". This will display how Photoshop is coping given its available resources. You want to see it read "100%" constantly. If it ever dips below 90% you're running out of RAM and are starting to page to disk. More RAM required!

[avandonk]

Chris I only use PS for a small final tweak or putting Starship Enterprise or the Moon into a widefield. I had noticed though that after a few major manipulations in PS that I could no longer even save what I had done as there was not enough memory left.

At the moment Registar is a bottleneck as I can only stack ten 190MB images at a time. When a 64 bit version becomes available the 32 bit memory address limit should disappear.

The 64 bit version of ImagesPlus is on it's way as we speak. I have played with the demo and it is no longer limited by image size. It also makes full use of multiple processors. It will do many sets of operations running concurrently. No longer will I have to wait for any process to finish before starting the next.

The only limit I can see is my necktop processor!

Bert

[AlexN]

Originally Posted by avandonk

The only limit I can see is my necktop processor!

Funny way of putting it... I feel the same way about mine!