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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: New Performance Panoramas A Memory Address Space Crash Course System Configuration Disk Caching? System Memory Density Impact WoW, WinXP and WinXP-64 Conclusion Discuss this article here:
Panorama Factory and the $64-bit Question What's in a Benchmark...?
(Review by MS, September 2, 2004)

Summary

64-bit Computing in Real Life

One of the few 64-bit applications currently available is Panorama Factory, a photo stitching program to analyse and align different photographs, and generate a seamless panorama - as long as there is enough overlap between the two pictures to find the common denominators. Panoramas created by this application can use a humongous amount of memory in the process and, provided high enough magnification and resolution of the individual source images, pose a real challenge to any current processor. We have a number of benchmarks to show the performance difference between 32-bit and 64-bit ported versions of the same benchmark, moreover, we take a close look at the issues related to memory address space limitations in a 32-bit or a 64-bit environment that may be somewhat different from the current grain of wisdom and even marketing propaganda.

PanoramaFactory

It’s been almost one year since 64 bit computing hit the shelves and despite all enthusiasm about the new platform we have yet to witness even the gentlest embrace by the software industry. Microsoft is not yet offering a fully functional 64 bit version of Windows but at least, they have workable betas available for both WindowsXP and 2003 Server. ATI appear to delve in obsolescence since functional 64 drivers are publicly available, albeit in beta format, for products as outdated as the Radeon 7000 family but nothing more recent than the RADEON 8500 or more powerful than the RADEON 9200 is supported. Whatever the reasons for that is beyond our understanding since we were informed in January that there were already some 64-bit Catalyst drivers for all RADEON cards in their preproduction phase…. Yet, nothing has happened since. The only support for 64-bit computing appears to come from nVidia with honorable mentioniing going to VIA for their Hyperion drivers

64-bit computing on the other hand lends tremendous importance to AMD and it is probably similarly important for Intel, as long as party lines are not disturbed. In some ways, 64-bit computing is important for the entire IT industry, especially the expansion of the memory horizons, including the one we get for free in the form of virtual memory or swap/page file. The latter will play an important part in the rest of this article but let’s not skip ahead and rather introduce the task at hand, that is Panorama Factory, first.

A stitched-together image from four different pictures taken at slightly different angles, courtesy of Smoky City. The same scene constitutes the bulk of benchmarks run in the following.

Panorama Factory is a program that automatically can stitch different photographs together by checking for common patterns and then aligning and blending those photographs to one single picture. Applications for this technology are generating panoramic images out of several different snapshots of the same area, as long as they at least partially overlap. In reality, this can be used for generating 360 degree panoramas, or, in more industrial / research-oriented environments to stitch together several images to a single picture. About 20 years ago, I would have died for any software like that, instead, I spent several weeks in the darkroom shading and aligning several dozens of photomicrographs of stained brain tissue to map the projections of nerve cells for an analysis of the neuroanatomical correlate of behavior – which we finally proved… but that was a different story from a different life

Back to Panorama Factory

It goes without saying that any task like the ones described above will consume an un-sum of memory. Moreover, anybody familiar with memory and virtual memory management will know that if there is not enough physical memory present in the system, Windows will use hard disk space to create temporary storage in the form of virtual memory. Aside from that, it is only intuitive that any 64-bit processor with double width internal registers (compared to any 32-bit processor) will be able to process data at a much faster rate than the narrower version, courtesy of the faster access time from the registers to the actual execution units. In addition, the memory limitations of a 32-bit processor system will no longer prevail, and therefore, larger conglomerates of pictures can be processed to any given panorama.

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