Well, people say/write a lot though they know only little.Darkling wrote:Would Windows XP be able to utilise your new hardware effectively, though? It may be time to move to the 21st century and start finding 64-bit editing programs that will run under Win7 x64 and (hopefully) allow you to work on much more complicated projects without running into these sorts of technical limitations?
In my case I am just using A LOT of effect plug-ins. Hey, we talk about some 250 tracks and maybe about 40 effects that the application has to run in real-time. Win7 or 8 wont fix that. ACID could be a bit more clever about not using CPU power on not actively running tracks though. Or maybe it's the Plug-in makers faults since I gain about 20% CPU power by muting the scenes I am not working on. And as I said over clocking by 25-30% just gives the needed edge
I scouted the net for reliable system comparisons and it turns out that there are few real 64bit applications. Java e.g. shall not have a 64bit version (and as i read might never have any soon), which means Windows will always rely on this WOW64, a virtual 32bit environment for 32 bit applications on 64 bit platforms. Because 32bit programms DO NOT run on 64 bit environments! Let that one sink slowly. It's a technical thing of incompatibility I read and vaguely understand. The CPU would just handle the data bus width wrongly with 64 bit and the app would quickly crash.
Apart from that, just turning an application from 32 bit to 64 does not necessarly makes much sense or give any performance gain - perhaps actually the contrary. (some) Opcodes take up about twice as much memory. So I read programs get bloated by about 30%+ only by compiling them in 64 bit.
Apart from turing up the CPU clock, additional speed increase is gained only if an application can make reasonable use of the specialised registers and hardware supported data types. Pretty much the same thing like when I switched from 8 Bit C64 to 16bit Atari ST assembler or having a floating point co-processor.
I 1st handedly know the case of my friend who uses audio libraries for orchestral sounds. The 32bit version of ProTools (in fact any 32 bit application) is limited to 2 GB of RAM (independently of Windows7/8 or XP). Esp since he combines the libraries to have them all running at the same time for a song ProTools quickly runs out memory. He has to use a 64 bit helper application which kind of inter communicates wit Protools and handles the GBs of sound files.
According to Intel itself XP can handle the i7 CPUs from SP2 on. The other thing I mentioned are the huge TeraByte drives, which are limited to 2TB partitions under 32bit... which isn't really an issue for me though. Problem will be to get appropiate hardware drivers for XP since it's not supported any more.
In fact many benchmarks are non-real life artificial special cases. A comparison of a server hi-end i7-4960 I found last night is in fact slower at executing games than the i7-4770. Though the 4960 naturally excells at specific computation tasks. It also has a slightly higher clock rate *nudge*nudge*
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/proz ... im-test/5/
It appears to be reasonable for me to stick with the 4770k which IS very powerful. I estimate about 3 to 6 times faster than my system now. (dependent on tasks like video rendering, zipping, audio encoding etc)
In addition the whole dual channel thingy is reported on wikipedia to DESPITE theoretical 50% boost to in fact not giving more than about 5% - if one is lucky. In special cases it might(!) be better.
So yeah... so much for 'your' 21. century.
The real difference are just not made public enough for me to compare.