Bloody Aria Technology....

[mcquiggd]

Oh, but Alexei, I have....

I am working for the software arm of a finance company that has gone 64bit.. Im a ... PERMIE.... gasp...

Basically I have replicated the work environment at home... plays Rome : Total War really sweet...

[AtW]

Dual cores are sweet for parallel data processing

[mcquiggd]

I bought one of those pentium D 805 jobbies for £79 inc VAT (Dual core 1Mb cache per core) and it overclocks to 3.4 GHZ on my £40 motherboard and puts out benchmarks to match my £200+ AMD X2 3800+ dual core chip.

Not bad for the money.

The Conroe chips are supposed to be pretty darn quick too DP... when they appear. Not sure about pricing.

Personally, I think dual core is well worth the cash. I used to go dual processor, but for the cost, dual core makes more sense...


P.S the x2 3800+ should overclock to the equivalent of the x2 4800+.

[mcquiggd]

Dual cores are sweet for parallel data processing

Oh yes... Im writing C# stuff using x64 .Net framework... 4 Gigs memory that can actually be used...

These days you need a fecking top end machine just to open Visual Studio et al.

[AtW]

Conroe is very good and very cheap, however there is question mark over performance when both cores are fully loaded - they have shared cache, so if only one core runs it will use whole 4 MB of cache, which will give some boost, but when both cores run they will have to split cache, less of advantage.

What are you using as 64-bit OS? I've got impression that nothing from Microsoft is stable enough to run serious stuff in 64-bit mode.

[mcquiggd]

The place is close to 'bleeding edge'.... Windows Server 2003 x64, .Net Framework 2 x64, Team Foundation Server, Sql Server 2005, VS 2005 etc.

Basically any new toy comes out, we get to play with it...

I like the Opterons the company uses.. hope AMD names it's next chip the Mysteron or sommat.....

Dev machines use either XP 64 bit or XP x64, depending on processor.

[AtW]

Is XP x64 stable enough for production work? I know its not good for game PC due to drivers, but perhaps its okay for server type of app running 64-bit .net? I am particularly curious about memory issues - due to fragmentation of heap I get way too many outofmemory errors despite loads of free physical RAM on 32 bit XP.

[mcquiggd]

I really only play strategy games such the superb Total War series http://www.totalwar.com/ ... even the original Shogun:Total War plays on XP x64.... it's about 6 years old...

Ive found no problems with drivers, but anti virus software was a problem at first. AVG professional, NOD32, and others now work fine. I havent had a single crash. x86 applications (i.e. 32 bit) seem to be quite happy.

I was using a dual boot Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (set up to run as a workstation), and x64 - then I just went full x64 as it suits my needs.

The new setup with latest Nvidia chipset, GPUs etc all came with x64 drivers.

[AtW]

Have you benchmarked memory intensive programs - you know that on 32bit system it is possible to get more RAM, but its achieved using bank switching in a way very close to how EMS used to operate in good old days of 640kb RAM PCs, 64-bitness is supposed to avoid cost of switching banks, so memory intensive stuff runs pretty quickly. I am actually tempted to try 64-bit Windoze since I have issue with heap fragmentation (or so I suspect).

[mcquiggd]

You can get legitmate 4 month trial version from Microsofts website....

I went for a 4 gig workstation as the OS and software I am using / writing potentially addresses more than the 3 gig limit of 32 bit windows...

From the benchmark utility tests I performed even with a lowly Sempron (overclocked to 2.2Ghz, single core), it trounced the overclocked P4 (single core, running at 3.6Ghz)... both with DDR2 800Mhz memory, WD Raptor RAID.