64 Bits and AMD, A Year Later - There are Apps that Can Use it, But...
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Looking through the available desktop applications with native 64 bit capabilities, I only found three (3!!) that might actually benefit from added performance. None of them are really what I would consider mainstream programs that many users would find themselves using daily. One is "Virtual Dub," which I use weekly at least. It's a program for encoding .avi files, mixing audio to video, and spliting those finished .avi's into smaller files. Virtual Dub is a key part of my backing up of DVDs to keep the actual discs in prime condition, or in working with home digital video. While certainly not to be confused with something like Adobe Premier as far as creating complicated timelines, it's free, unlike the much more slick Adobe product.
Since it does take hours to compress a video to Divx with the processor running pinned to 100%, this is one of those apps that could benefit from the extension to 64 bits, and more importantly the added registers in native 64 mode. Lacking a K8 with 64 bit capability at the moment (the Sempron 3100+ has had that taken out of it), I can't test to see what kind of an improvement there is from the 32 bit version, but that situation will be corrected in the coming weeks.
The other program that I think could take some advantage of the new environment, is one that pastes together multiple side by side pictures to create a single panoramic frame. Having used this before to create large cityscape and skyline photos, I can speak to how processor intensive of a task it is. So Panorama Factory is another program I'm planning to try out in both 64 and 32 bit versions.
A 64 bit build of PovRay 3.6 could also manage to show some gains. But again, this is even more of a niche product than the two above for the desktop sector. It might be a good indicator of possible increases that could be shown in more popular workstation class rendering programs such as Maya or 3ds Max.
And that's it. All the other "64 bit" programs I came across on my search weren't anything that push 32 bit integers, or the 8 GPRs very hard. A 64 bit version of Nero isn't going to make your burner any faster. A 64 bit version of Clockgen isn't going to tell you any different information, or make your CPU overclock more. MySQL 4 I also found in a 64 bit extension, but that's really an area that's only going to be dealt with by servers (and more than likely on Linux, which has a few flavors of x86-64 distributions now). I don't think it's something most people are going to be concerned with on the desktop. I'm not quite sure how a 64 bit version of Firefox will accomplish anything different from the excellent 32 bit one, other than make some of the plugins not work correctly.
Next: Intel Was Right to Wait >>
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