music: 64 bit is good for your audio health
Daniel James is the man behind 64 Studio, a Linux Distribution specifically aimed at utilising the power of 64 bit CPU's. He's also a contributor to the UK magazine, Sound on Sound.
Here he explains a little about why 64 bit means good
things for audio manglers and musicians.
www.64studio.com
64-bit chips and making music
Back in 1995, Microsoft caused a world-wide drought in the RAM market. Users were forced to upgrade hardware just to make the new Windows 95 release run properly. Prices for SIMMS soared, and a new sub-genre in burglary was created - RAM theft. In north London, where I was living at the time, small-time crooks were actually hustling memory modules on street corners. These 4MB SIMMS were offered from their vendors' bare hands with a coating of pocket fluff, the miscreants obviously being unfamiliar with anti-static precautions.
Twelve years later, and if anything, there's a RAM glut in the PC market. Microsoft knows that most people can only be made to pay for Windows and Office when they buy new hardware, and of course the volume PC makers need compelling reasons for people to make that investment - like a new version of Windows being released. But today's killer applications for 'consumers' are web-based, work with any OS, and require only modest performance on the client side, fracturing the symbiotic relationship between the hardware vendors and Microsoft that has existed since the 80's.
In the UK, IT analysis firm Gartner reported that computer stores overstocked in the last quarter, in anticipation of consumer demand for Windows Vista in the 'back to school' season which did not materialise. The RAM vendors were better prepared this time, and the PC builders made sure that even low-end PCs now come with up to 2GB RAM as standard. It's just as well for Microsoft, as from anecdotal evidence the RAM-hungry Vista runs slower than XP, even on the newest hardware. (This article isn't about Microsoft bashing, but I'll just note this, and move on - Wikipedia's page Criticism_of_Windows_Vista is included in Category:Articles_with_too_many_examples).
So what's the relevance of all this to music making with free software? It's my belief that the Microsoft-driven trend towards commodity computers having ever-faster processors and greater amounts of RAM (instead of, say, lower power consumption, or greater longevity) has had the unintended side-effect that artists can now achieve a great deal more with affordable hardware. In a little over a decade, the amount of RAM fitted to a PC has increased by over 1000 times, or 1024 times if you're a pedant. A PC now sold as a loss-leader in a supermarket can do more than the most expensive SGI workstation from the 90's, hardware that few of us could afford at the time.
Although most proprietary audio software is still 32-bit, most free software has been working well on AMD64/Intel64 for some time now. Many users are running native 64-bit multimedia distros like our own product, 64 Studio, and getting better performance than from 32-bit distros installed on the same machine. I'm sure the other multimedia distros will produce 64-bit versions when their developers and users get newer hardware and see the performance benefits. These advantages come about for three main reasons:
1. AMD64/Intel 64 machines have a better memory architecture, and there's no practical upper limit on the amount of RAM you can use, other than the size of your wallet/credit card/overdraft. 32-bit architectures are theoretically limited to 4GB RAM, although in practise there are even lower limits because the motherboards for 32-bit CPUs often don't support that much RAM. For example, an iMac from last year with a 32-bit Intel Core Duo CPU will only take a maximum of 2GB RAM. This year's iMac has a 64-bit Core 2 Duo and can be fitted with 4GB.
2. It raises the bar for processor optimisations - there's now just one (improved) target when building binaries, instead of i386, i586, i686 etc etc. All AMD64 CPUs have SSE2 instructions, which can dramatically cut CPU usage if your software is designed to take advantage of them; Ardour has that support, for instance. In the last couple of years, 64-bit CPUs have appeared with the later SSE3 instructions too. This will become slightly more complicated as new CPUs with SSE4 and SSE4a instructions become more widely available, such as AMD's just-launched Phenom quad-core chip. These are effectively the second generation of AMD64 technology, which AMD calls K10. (They skipped K9, presumably because of dog jokes. No Doctor Who fans in Sunnyvale, then). Intel has SSE4 in its 'Penryn' processors, the 45nm Core 2 Duo chips, also launched this month.
3. Audio processing is all about maths, and 64-bit architectures are designed to crunch bigger integers. While the CPU vendors went down this route with stock market calculations and nuclear tests in mind, and artists making music are somewhere near the bottom of their priority lists, we can hang on the coat-tails of the military-industrial complex, and get the benefits.
Microsoft and its ISV partners in the audio field haven't had nearly as much success in getting their users to try platforms like XP 64-bit Edition. Gates and Ballmer fudged the Vista launch by bringing out six different versions, most of which are available in both 64-bit and 32-bit, but one of which (Starter) is 32-bit only. Since Vista barely runs on legacy hardware and there are very few 32-bit-only desktop or laptop CPUs available now, it would have been a better idea to drop the 32-bit versions altogether and give people a genuine reason to upgrade - sorry, I promised not to bash the company...
The main drawback to going fully 64-bit native is the sketchy support for 32-bit software (usually proprietary). In 64 Studio, we now have 32-bit Firefox plugins (e.g. Adobe's Flash Player 9) working on otherwise 64-bit systems, but there's still some work to be done for VST support. In the meantime, we have a 32-bit alternative build available for users that rely on VSTs, which is useful for people with legacy hardware too. It's a convenient upgrade path for users who are considering getting a 64-bit machine in future, as the two builds are exactly the same from an end-user point of view. It's also good for a large site where there's a mixture of older and newer PCs, some with 64-bit capable CPUs and some without.
There are also some venerable audio programs which have proved difficult to port to a new architecture - Csound 4 doesn't work on AMD64, Csound 5 does. Pure Data comes somewhat late to the native 64-bit party, due to some 32-bit assumptions in core code. But it's possible to run a hybrid distro with both 64-bit and 32-bit libraries, which might be a solution for users who rely on those apps.
We are already at the point where 32-bit software isn't making the most out of today's hardware. But luckily for us, PCs are fast, powerful, and cheaper than ever. Screw spreadsheets - we can actually do something useful with multi-gigabytes of RAM and dual-core or quad-core processors. Like running very large sample libraries, hundreds of DSP plugins, unlimited numbers of audio tracks - while mixing HD video on the fly. The raw power is there; we just need to take advantage of it.
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