[linux-audio-dev] Athlon64 .. performance boost ?

[Benno Senoner]

Robert Jonsson wrote:

>
>Since we are in a world where 64bit native is only a recompile away (tm)... 
>Anyone have any insights on the possible performance improvements with that 
>perspective?
>
>I've heard the Athlon64 has lots of registers, lots of cache, more pipelines 
>and, well, it's 64bit, it sure sounds as if it would make one hell of a 
>difference, right?
>
>/Robert
>
I'm curious too about the performance boost we can achieve by 
recompiling HD Recording and software sampler/synths
as 64bit.
Any estimates ? (eg the same app delivers 50% more performance when run 
in 64bit mode)  I mean: the Athlon 64 should provide higher memory 
bandwidth which is beneficial anyway
but I'm curious if synthesis/processing is sped up too (by larger 
caches, 64bit cache bus etc).

Or on the other hand if one could use 64bit integer processing 
substituting it to floating point processing.
Juan L. always tells me about the great speed you can achieve writing 
audio apps that work with integers but I always
felt that 32bit offers too little headroom (imagine mixing hundreds of 
voices with individual volumes without loosing
the original sample quality and providing some headroom for FX 
processing etc.
With 64bit this would be probably viable because it provides you a 
dynamic range of 385db without scaling and clipping.
Or is the FPU in the AMD64 just as fast as the integer unit ?
floating point is easier to deal with (because you do not need to fear 
clipping thus do not need to scale value to emulate
 fixed point fractional arithmetic), but we all know speed is one of the 
main issues in audio software.

comments ?

Benno
http://www.linuxsampler.org



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>>Takashi
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