Great 64-bit start this week
So much going on in 64-bit Windows land in the first 2 days of this week already. Some of the pretty exciting news:
Simulation is one of the areas where applications can really shine in 64-bit. Masses of memory and compute power at hand. One of the latest app in this space is HFSS for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Ansoft just announced the availability of the 64-bit version of their v10 product: “The migration of Ansoft electromagnetic technology to a 64-bit operating system delivers additional capacity and speed to the simulation of high-performance electronic designs.”
I guess most of us do some sort of video editing, manipulation and rendering, also a great area where 64-bit application have a great advantage over their 32-bit siblings. My favorite has been and still is Virtual Dub. Virtual Dub is now available for x64 Windows platforms. Have you tried it already? How’s the performance?
Not really an app you would use every day but worth mentioning anyways is AMD’s SimNow. Virtualization will become the next big thing in the PC world. Intel and AMD announced processor support for virtualization and promised to ship processors supporting this technology in silicon soon. SimNow in AMD words: “…a high-performance AMD64 simulator that provides software developers with access to features of AMD’s next-generation processor technologies, including AMD’s virtualization technology, code named “Pacifica.” SimNow is designed to enable software developers to emulate single- and dual-core AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™ processor-based systems that run commercial operating systems and applications, and to allow them to write and test software in advance of the commercial availability of processors implementing the features.” It will be downloadable from Aug 2nd on here. At least this is what their website says. What I don’t understand is why their press announcement talks about x86.
UGS’ NX digital development software NXTM is now available on hp x64 workstations featuring AMD64 and Intel EM64T processors. The “functional benefits” section of the press announcement outlines some of the core 64-bit benefits for applications in this space! But wait, even though you may be able to order the software today, it will be “…shipping in the fourth quarter of this year.”
And there is the story about real 64-bit performance on the Windows Server side. 64-bit Windows server and SQL Sever 2005 EE 64-bit Edition. Yesterday, “NEC Solutions America Achieves Best TPC-H (1000GB) Benchmark Score among Servers Using Next Generation Microsoft(R) SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003 with NEC Itanium(R) 2-Based Express5800/1320Xe Server.” Read more here.