AMD released its 64 bit chip last week. Buzz is that this is going to be fantastic for games & other graphics intensive stuff. Microsoft still has yet to rlease 64 bit XP version (Betas scheduled for spring of 2004). Just wondering now, does Blender need to adapt in some way to take advantage of this, like 64bit games? :-?
I run Blender on my dual Opteron, and it’s plenty fast as it is. The Opteron and Athlon 64/FX have two goals: To be the fastest 32 bit processors right now, and to be the fastest 64-bit processors once the migration starts.
Blender will probably run a lot faster from a simple recompile to 64-bit, so I don’t think it’s necessary to adapt. It would be nice, though – a 64 bit chip can address a lot more in a flat memory space, so we could add more lights, more vertices, etc. without having to do weird caching hacks.
Maybe in Blender 3.0 we could add multithreading support. I don’t think there are too many people who run Blender on dual processor workstations, but I have run it on two so far. It would be difficult to do correctly, but I’m sure it would lessen doubt in some people’s minds about how solid and useful a program Blender is.
Just my $0.02.
Matt
Ye Multi-threading sounds good, wouldnt that give it a nice boost on Pentium 4’s?
you’d have to recompile it AND change the architecture flags to get the most out of it. …but that’s no problem at all …it’s just two flags -mcpu and -march 