On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Chris Mauritz wrote: > Paul Heinlein wrote: >> On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Chris Mauritz wrote: >> >>> Johnny Hughes wrote: >>>> Personally ... unless I know for a fact that I will not need any >>>> i386 software, I install i386 and not x86_64 distro. If I wanted >>>> a workstation, I would not install x86_64. That is just my >>>> opinion. >>> >>> Me too. 8-) >> >> Da! The i386 release is blistering fast and very well behaved on the >> Opterons in our shop. > > Yup, it's very happy on my dual Opteron 270 boxes too. Is there any reliable > information on potential speedup by going to 64-bit? For typical server > duty, I can't see how, but I'm sure that's not the case on boxes with big > honkin' databases or ones doing serious number crunching. > <disclaimer> No scientific data follows </disclaimer> In our shop we are rending animation. We have dual opterons. We render with the 64 bit version of mental ray. We did side by side tests and found that the larger and more complex the task is the more savings there were, but when rendering a bunch of small simple files the savings were not noticeable. On the very complex shots we cut render times by almost half. Most of our jobs are not very complex so the ratio evens out at about roughly a 10-20 percent gain. But the thing is that when the time comes to do something very complex comes it can be finished in say three days as opposed to five days.