What will 64 bit CPUs mean to VJ apps?

[elbows]

Just wondered if any developers could comment on how 64 bit CPU's may help VJ apps to better features, performance etc.

I know it will take years for these things to develop, and that at the moment there may be details in the AMD & Intel specs which are unknown, so nobody knows what exactly performance etc will be like, or how well compilers wil be written to support 64 bit etc.

Will it make much difference? Memory bandwidth is whats killing my performance at the moment, I think I need a 500Mhz FSB more than 64 bit?

[infopocalypse]

As most VJ apps are written in C++ or VB, and not utalizing assembly instructions. Until the compiler itself switches over, the new opcodes will mean nothing to the VJ soft. Hell... MMX has been around forever and I don't know of many developers using it (I am)... and it makes a tremendous difference in the # of filters and customization possible on that.

Also the only OS capable of dealing with the 64-bit chips is XP.

[Nema]

currently we have c++ with some nice compilers, optimizing codes for a 32-bit OS. if the developer wants to optimize his codes, he must code directly in assembler. the mmx-instructions are 64-bit assembler-instructions and they are designed especially for the use of multimedia-programming (colorfilters and such things).
as the main-developer of visualJockey i have optimised nearly every single loop of each effect in visualJockey in assembler or mmx-assembler. the optimised effect-loops define 95% of the final effectcombinations-speed, the other 5% depend on the memory-management of the main-engine and the single effects. compiling the visualJockey-engine for a 64-bit OS would probably not result in a visible performance-jump at all, except if the 64bit-OS would be faster itself (what we all hope!). the reason why visualJockey-effects are so fast already (:)!), is because most of them are already using optimised 64 bit mmx-codes, and i guess most of them could not be optimised much with another set of 64 bit instuctions or with more registers.
the speed of VJ-apps in general will depend mainly on the following hardware-improvements: cpu-cache, the frequenzy of the main-board-bus, common improvements of the dataflow-traffic between RAM, gfx-card-RAM, 3D-chip and cpu-registers. the cpu-frequency itself is currently NOT the bottleneck (it's the limited cpu-cache!). but all in all, i am afraid that the 64-bit generation will code even lazier than the current 32 bit generation and that most applications will not run much faster at all.

you must also keep in mind that the max bit-depth of your desktop is limited to 32 bit (which is enough for your eyes). that means that only a few pixel-based algorithms can be optimized for 64 bit (calculating 2 32-bit-pixels in one cpu-step), i.e. colorfilters, masksblendungs, negations... can do that, but fancy offest-distortions usually can't.