[Gllug] On Linux, fast, it is

[Martyn Drake]

John Hearns wrote:

> My guess is that AMD Sledgehammer could be big here.

Depends really.  Will Alias|Wavefront and all the other big boys in the 
post-production/visual-effects industry port their code to 64-bit X86 
code?  What about Apple now that it's bought Shake (and now very 
possibly Silicon Grail's Rayz)?

> The Register has had articles on AMD getting graphics card manufacturers
> interested.

Certainly Nvidia appear to have created dual 32-bit and 64-bit versions 
of their drivers, which is encouraging...

> Couple a high end graphics card with a four-way Sledgehammer system and
> you would have a pretty spiffing box for special effects work.

SuSE have already announced support for this processor - but I've not 
seen or heard anything from other distributors as yet, but I'm sure that 
they will support the new processor.  Also, Micro$oft have announced 
they're porting XP over to 64-bit X86, so I can't see why we won't see 
other operating systems such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD being ported over as 
well.

> I wonder if any of the software companies are working on making use
> of the vector register banks on these processors.

The fact that this processor will run either in 32-bit or 64-bit mode 
will at least allow folk to run their existing applications until 
developers move over to 64-bit code.

Regards,

	Martyn

-- 
Martyn Drake                 | Email :    martyn-d at moving-picture.com
Systems Administrator        | Web   :  http://www.moving-picture.com
The Moving Picture Company   | Phone :            +44 (0)20 7494 7853


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