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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: Another $64-bit Question PanoramaFactory Revisited Test Configurations Wizard and Stitch Alignment and Geometry Transformations Redering and Blending The Final Crop Conclusions Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
Intel Pentium4 600 64-bit Performance PanoramaFactory Revisited
(Review by MS March 2, 2005)

Summary

Intel's entering the 64-bit market has been a bit of a clandestine cloak and dagger action, we did not even see the usual benchmarks in the marketing collateral. One of the bigger questions is whether it is as easy as sticking a few additional registers into a processor that was incepted at the end of the 16-bit era, produced to run at 32-bit and in its old days needs to adapt to the new 64-bit environment. Along these lines, as powerful as the 600 series may be with its double cache size, some initial reports claimed that the 64-bit performance more or less lags behind the 32-bit performance. Keep in mind that the benchmarks conducted were all comparing a WoW emulation against native 32-bit OS where driver variations alone may cause more variance in the results than the differences in operating systems. That aside, we have taken the P4-660 and the new ExtremeEdition and pitted them against the Socket940 Athlon64-FX53 in a true 64-bit benchmark. Some of the results may be surprising but they all show how much is to be gained from the overdue transition to 64 bit computing in the high-end desktop and workstation sector.

Full access to 64-bit computing has been a privilege of mostly the Mac community with full support by OS-X and the IBM PowerPC970 family. AMD’s forays into the 64 bit space were primarily hindered by the lack of availability of mainstream operating system support, and exacerbated by the lack of working drivers for high-end ATI cards, as well as the lack of applications ported for 64-bit Windows versions. Needless to say that it is possible to run 32-bit applications in a Windows on Windows or WoW.

Of course, WoW does not have any performance incentive over a native 32-bit operating system, rather, WoW incurs a minor overhead in the order of 0-4 % performance hit compared to a native 32-bit environment. In most applications, this overhead appears to be a consequence of immature drivers rather than a real translational overhead incurred by the porting of the 32-bit application by means of WoW to the 64-bit OS, though, and it is a matter of time until we’ll see driver optimizations catching up and mitigating these differences.

64-bit Cross-Platform compatibility

We have been using Windows 64 since the earliest demo versions were available, with both WinXP-64 and Windows 2003 Server 64 and in general, there were a few bugs but at least build 1069 appeared to be quite mature. However, none of these earlier versions managed to install with the P4 platform, after loading the IDE drivers from the floppy during installation, the system inadvertently crashed and spontaneously rebooted which could have been hardware-related. However, different beta versions crashed consistently at at the same different stages of the driver loading phase which is a clear indication of software problems triggering the “TCO Timer Reboot function”.

Suffice it to say that all of these problems went away after downloading the latest Release Candidate (Build 3790, Service Pack1, v.1433) from MicroSoft, along with the latest ICH-7 drivers from Intel. Meanwhile, there are also substantial driver libraries available, including release candidates or final versions for ATI and nVidia drivers. Getting up and running was a matter of another 30 minutes for a fresh installation of WinXP

Benchmarking 64-bit applications thus far features the main dilemma that there aren’t any. FutureMark has a 64-bit benchmark in the works, however, it will not be available until at least the official release of Windows XP-64. We heard rumors about other applications being ported to 64-bit but in the tradition of Intel or AMD, we won’t comment further on unannounced products. There is, however, one benchmark available that we covered in the past to hilight the performance advantage of 64-bit computing, namely Panorama Factory.

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