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  4. Huge computer leap this year!

  • Huge computer leap this year!

    J
    J
    Just read about the new Intel 45 processor

    http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/45nm_technology.htm?iid=homepage+42nm

    slated for introduction in Macs THIS YEAR. Already run OSX...

    Could this help us get VI's to run on a single computer (RAM permitting?)

    Julian
  • J
    J
    "RAM permitting" is the big question.

    The new process/material is said to offer considerable performance improvements, which is always good, but RAM will still (always?) be an issue.

    That said, I've been thinking more about other ways to approach a farm setup. Earlier today, I just about ripped out my very small portion of hair when I accidently clicked on a second open session in Logic, only to be faced with a painfully long VI sample reloading fiasco, from which there was no escape. It started me thinking that, actually, I don't think I want VIs on my sequencer machine at all anymore -- or any samples, for that matter. I know others have talked about the benefits of this philosophy (can't recall who, exactly), but it really seems like the way to go. You could easily have headless PCs all boot right into their templates, and you'd never have to mess with them at all!

    Now, with that in mind, I started poking around on my PC. I noticed that the PC doesn't have the strange limitation that all plugin instance RAM gets loaded into a separate vsl-server process. Rather, it appears that the memory is all contained in the plugin host's process (Plogue Bidule, in my case). So, I'm wondering how much RAM one could put in a PC and address *if they used multiple hosts*. That is, if I used, say, Audiomulch and Bidule (or copies of Bidule), could I access around 3 GB "live", and without any 3 GB switch? Or is the "switch" a limitation of the system itself, regardless of how much a single process is requesting. I can't see why not, as there's no need for any single process to access more than it's 1.5-ish GBs, but I wonder if anybody knows for sure. If this is the case, one could do quite well with a couple of slave PCs, running 4+ GB of RAM, and two hosts on each machine.

    Does that work in PC land? How much RAM can a PC physically address anyway?... If I could install 8 GB of RAM in a PC, could I access it all providing I accessed it using 3 or 4 different processes? I don't know how XP handles RAM, so sorry for the goofy questions.


    J.
  • J
    J
    ...duh, okay. I might have found an answer from Dr. Google:

    "Because *applications* have to be written to be PAE-aware,
    and have to be written in 64-bit address space to make use of
    anything over 4GB. This was (and still is) very much a niche
    market -- very few desktop/workstation users will come close
    to using 2GB, let alone 4, which is why MS originally split the
    4GB address range between 2GB user space and 2GB
    system space."

    The top part was obvious, but MS splitting the address space into two 2 GB chunks is just weird. Oh well. Clearly this is what the 3 GB switch is all about. But if one buys a logic board that supports over 4 GB, then how does the 3 GB switch function? Does it just give you 3 GB for applications, no matter how much RAM you have?

    Sorry... need an education in how PCs think.

    J.

    --- and of course all of this should be leading to the ultimate question: Why doesn't VSL build a proprietary "VSLinux" distro! mmm... totally headless, 64-bit VSL servers! yum, yum... Is there an internal Vienna Instrument for Linux, btw? Christian? Anybody?
  • cmC
    VSL Team
    cmC
    jbm, i don't think we could process the support for LINUX - too many different flavours of this OS and too few working drivers (audio-related).
    which sequencer would one use? VST hosts? filesystem? too many questions ... and more problematic: too many answers
    and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.
  • J
    J
    oops! Bummer... ignore my PM... just coming through the ether!

    Any suggestions on the best way to max-out a PC slave, then? Considering the notion of running multiple vst hosts?

    J.
  • J
    J
    last edited
    last edited

    @cm said:

    filesystem?


    NFS, of course!! [;)]

    J.
  • D
    D
    I believe that if you are using 32bit applications in something like XP64 you can get up to 4GB for sample loading. Obviously some of this will be needed for the OS. However, there have been reports of getting 8GB samples loaded in XP64 using FX-Teleport. I don't know why this should work, as I would assume that all apps would have to be 64bit in order for this to work, but if this were to be true, you could load a huge number of samples into a machine of this sort and as long as your audio card had a suitable driver it should be OK. However, I thought that as soon as you introduce a 32bit app into equation, the RAM limit becomes 4GB. maybe some clever person like cm can clarify this for us.

    DG