On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 11:35 -0500, Ben Scott wrote: > This doesn't really relate directly to FLOSS, but the reality of > these questions might well dictate the course of future events (i.e., > World Domination), and I know there are a lot of smart, "in touch" > people on this list, so... > > On 2/15/07, Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > "What practical benefit will the end-user reap from 64-bit > > computing?" "... There might be more of a > > press to provide good 64-bit capable software if there an actual > > reason to do so, ya know? ;-) > > I've been asking the question, "How would an end-user significantly > benefit from x86-64?" > > Last night at Martha's, Matt Brodeur pointed out one thing that > could actually count: Full motion video editing. This is something > that even the hypothetical grandmother might want to do. Digital > camcorders recording to random access storage are likely going to > replace mag tape and film in the next several years. People will want > to pull that into their home PC and mess around with it, just like > they do with photos now. Except that such home videos could easily > grow to 30 gigabytes or more. Large memories and good 64-bit integer > performance will actually be useful to such users. > > Anyone got any other ideas? > > (Pedantic Note #1: I'm not disputing the benefits of x86-64 for > "heavy duty" computing, such as servers, multimedia production, or > other things perused by organizations. I'm talking about what *end > users* use their PCs for. The people browsing MySpace, forwarding > their email chain letters, downloading illegal music with > Kanapsterwire, and looking at pron.) Ben,
You seem to be defining every "end user" as "mom-and-pop-home", or "bank teller". In the scientific and engineering world we have things like CAD packages that detail millions of parts, then wish to put that into a whole for a simulation. To "simulate" a cockpit of a 747 easily takes the address space of 32-bits. To "simulate" an entire 747 needs 64-bits. Yes, it can be done other ways, but the complexity of the boundary-edge processing makes the programs amazingly complex and slow to execute. This class of problems usually cranks away on terabytes of data AT ONE TIME, and may run for days or weeks FOR ONE ITERATION. These end users want a 64-bit system so they can write and test the programs and solve them on their "workstation", or at least write and test them before sending them off to a massive machine someplace that will run them very fast. Weather forecasting, global modeling, and even Matt's example of video are all lumped together into what most system vendors call "scientific and engineering", making up about 16% of the total system market. The other 84% belongs to "commercial computing" (transaction based, small processes that live a short life). Beowulf systems were a way of taking these very large and long "scientific" problems and treating them by decomposing the problem and having lots of different system boxes work on them. While this can be done with a lot of problems (particularly those in the fluid dynamic space), there are lots of problems where the data transfer latency or speed between systems is just a killer, and vector computers with very large address spaces are still the king. Engineers and scientists want to process small amounts of data for testing, etc. on their workstation/"PC". We continually reach out for larger and larger problems to solve. It is not that the problems have suddenly appeared, it is just that now we finally have the tools we need at the price that makes them feasible to solve. Music sharing did not go over too well until mp3s came along, but having mp3s still would not have allowed "Internet sharing" if you had no more than a 150 bps modem. And a 10 GBit Ethernet is not that needed if your entire disk farm is made up of 10 5MB disks. I think what you are really talking about is better described as the boundary between what people call "commercial" or "transaction" processing and "Scientific" and "Engineering" processing. Mom&Pop are "commercial", Stephen Hawking is "Scientific". Guess who benefits the most from 64-bits, but both are "end users". Warmest regards, maddog _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
