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64bit technology

peter_hajdu

New member
Do you have any experience if the WINXP 64bit and Wildfire2+Intralink 3.4 have any advantage when working on rather big (1-1.2GB) asm and complex drawings?


What should I expect?
 
Your 1.2 GB does not "qualify" to be needing a larger memory model than the 4GB 32-bits limit.


And as far as I'm concerned, the only thing mature at present is 64-bit hardware.


Alex
 
Generaly would my system faster when using XP64bit and WF2?


I asked about the memory limit because when I open two bigger models parallel in separate seccions these mainly use my 2GB RAM and the PC is rather slow.


But when I have 4GB RAM I should do something with the 3GB memory limit as well+ I was thinking if I could get some advantage from this 64bit technology
 
64bit windows is recommended to run with 4GB RAM and above.



I don't have an example of speed improvement for large assembly but the
time needed to run the photorendering and mechanica analysis has been
cut short using 64bit..



hard to justify whether it is improved by 64bit or not cause the RAM has increase so much in the machine





Edited by: proengineertips
 
64bit hardware technology witha 64bit OS does NOT improve performance over a 32bit system. Performance comes from the application taking advantage of more memory.
 
We can remove the 3GB limit form our 32bit XP, too.What is the difference between the usage of that 32bit and this newer 64bit XP?


When they don't have 3GB Memory limit, what to use?


My PC is 64bit version.
 
peter_hajdu said:
Generaly would my system faster when using XP64bit and WF2?


I asked about the memory limit because when I open two bigger models parallel in separate seccions these mainly use my 2GB RAM and the PC is rather slow.


But when I have 4GB RAM I should do something with the 3GB memory limit as well+ I was thinking if I could get some advantage from this 64bit technology


There is no 3GB limit but a 3GB option. A 32-bit environment can only adress 4 GB of memory. The way Windows is set up it will use 2 GB for your application and 2 GB for itself when 4 GB is available. With the 3 GB switch you can force Win into using only 1 GB for itself. I have seen comments however that 1 GB for Windows can be insufficient in some cases. Look for info on the extra "USERENV" setting you can add to tweak memory use.


When having 2 sessions with large models I would suppose virtual memory swapping gets into action, which will make any PC slow.


Alex
 
In reality, WinXP 32-bit is limited to about 1.7 GB per application. You can enable the /3GB switch and recompile xtop.exe to take advantage of additional available memory. It has been my experience that this makes other applications unstable - like Excel. I finally gave up and went back to the default settings.


We now have 2 users running XPx64 with Wildfire 2.0 64-bit M220. Both have positive comments on the performance, but nothing is really dramatic. Retrieving files directly from the Commonspace (Intralink 3.4 M030) is distinctly faster, and Vericut appears to have benefited as well. Complex drawings don't seem to have improved (20 sheet exploded drws). The OS appears fairly stable and I don't think we've blue-screened yet.


Be aware too that not everything works on XPx64. For example, Adobe has yet to deliver a compatible version of Acrobat. Reader works, but there is no Adobe PDF printer. Likewise, Microsoft Intellipoint has problems too. We've worked around these (using PDF995 and xMouse). We can't seem to make a PDF of the shaded model window, just drawings.


Regards
Peter Brown
 
As far as I learned, any speedup beneath the RAM limit comes primarily from the fact that AMD64 CPUs received added data registers to alleviate one age-old limitation of the x86 instruction set.

This makes some operations substantially faster while other gained nothing.

Also notable is that 64-bit code takes more space than 32-bit, so the same data sets fill more RAM. This is unfortunate if the 32-bit version already pushed the physical RAM envelope.

There ends the scope of my knowledge.
 

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