Will Proe be a 64 bit Program in the Next Release?

I am looking to buy a new system and wondering if a 32 bit processor (P4)
will be obsolete within the next release of Pro/e, if they go 64 bit. I
read that Intel will release a processor with 64 bit extensions this August,
but I need the machine now. According to Toms Hardware, in speed processors
I am considering P4 3.0 GHz - Athlon64 3000, the P4 is about 10-15%
faster.
So, that's part of the downside of the Althon64. Anyone know if Pro/e will
be both 32 and 64 bit
compatible? Or if the current P4 motherboards could be upgraded with a 64
bit processor?

TIA

 

You got a answer in the SolidWorks forum but I have to say, that
comparison can't be right, the AMD 64's have shown to be faster than the
P4's for a while now unless it is a specific intel related 32 bit
processor/software case (media player)?
Your best choice now is to buy the latest/fastest AMD 64 bit
processor(s) so you can run your existing 32 bit programs now and 64 bit
ones as well as OS later.
BTW, as you probably know already, 64 bit is not going to make things go
faster and in many cases it will actually be slower. What it will do is
address more memory to run larger data sets so if you are doing very
large assemblies or doing very large analysis models, yeah, 64 bit will
be a big help.

...

 

I saw an article a month or three ago about a parking garage project (?)
running on, I think, a 64 bit system. I've tried to find the link to the
article since and haven't been able to. Wondering if anyone knows it's
whereabouts?

 

there it is... the 64 bit hype. Do you really expect parts > 4GB ?

BTW, Pro/E has already been running on 64 Bit Hardware back in 1996.
Not in 64 bit mode, though :-( - and it were no wintel machines.

Remember the oversampling bits hype with audio cd players?
It all ended up using 1 bit dacs - so when will we see the first,
true revolutionary 1 bit wide cpu eventually?

Walther

 

No, but how about assemblies.

And make that > 2GB.

Regards,

 

You could very well be right about the AMDs better performance. I have seen
some benchmarks that the AMDs are faster in SolidWorks. And some users
report increased speed also. But the problem with the benchmarks I've found
is the test systems have other variables that don't isolate the processor
performance. In the Toms benchmark the processor performance looks to be is
isolated http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040322/prescott-07.html., but
there is no test with SolidWorks. I guess a case could be made that the
SPECviewperf benchmark does not represent real world performance and that
could explain why users are finding the AMDs are faster.

BTW, I've posted the question here also, since this is a both a software
and hardware related issue and I run both ProE and Solidworks.

Thanks for the input.

 

No, my main concern is system hardware obsolescence if I buy a 32 bit
machine.

Yes, is it marketing hype from AMD. But, seems pretty successful from a
business standpoint.

 

They're always obsolete by the time you get it home and booted, anyway. 8~)

 

http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BLL/is_1_21/ai_112597709
http://cadalyst.adv100.com/cadalyst/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=80666

 

Is this the link? http://www.designnews.com/article/CA372496


Yes, those are them. Thank you, gentlemen (assuming goblin is a gent<g>).

That stuff is mildly impressive. 8~)

 

64 bit are only necessary if a _single_ file is going to exceed
that limit AFAIK - moldflow parts of some thousand features are
the biggest files I experienced yet ("only" dozens of MB in size).
Assemblies IMO tend to be rather small compared to parts.

Maybe I did too rough a calculation: 2E32=4294967296 Bytes.
What am I eventually missing here?

I think one will run into trouble much earlier.

Walther

 

64 bit are only necessary if a _single_ file is going to exceed

Believe the limit is what the application; e.g. Pro/E, can address.

 

I believe Many 32-bit OSes reserve the upper bit for kernel usage.
Therefore the correct number is 2^31 which is about 2GB.

Each application/process is limited to a 2GB address space. Pro/E
opening 2GB of data (assemblies/parts/drawings/whatever) will run out of
addressable memory and crash. Pro/E seems to crash much earlier than
the 2GB limit for whatever odd reason.

As time progresses and designs get more complicated and CAD becomes more
of a memory hog this limit becomes a big problem.

Check the archives, this is a FAQ.

I suppose this is why big projects tend to use expensive UNIX hardware
instead of cheap PCs. Pro/E has access to huge memory spaces on
Solaris/AIX/HP-UX/IRIX.

I wonder if Linux on Itanium or Linux on Opteron is also 64-bit? AFAIK
a 64-bit version of Windows is under development. Who'd really want to
run it though?

Regards,

 

I´m running Pro/E on "expensive UNIX hardware" - have you seen prices
dropping for SGI Octane machines at ebay recently? And these kind of
machines sure do _not_ have to be replaced each year...

Though it´s true what you said about address space I doubt that Pro/E
will access it properly - that would be only the case if compiled for
64 bit architecture. Under SGI IRIX there´s 32 and 64 bit and Pro/E has
been running on both variants unchanged.

Anybody a 2.1 GB Part for download? I´ll give it a try.

Cheers

Walther

 

Though it´s true what you said about address space I doubt that Pro/E

http://www.designnews.com/article/CA372496 from Bob's post above.

http://www.ptc.com/partners/hardware/current/itanium_letter.htm

 

A specific release Pro/Engineer Wildfire including Pro/MECHANICA runs in 64
bit mode on the Intel Itanium platform. This version is supported by PTC and
contains specific Itanium code so it will not run on the AMD64. We run
MECHANICA analyses up to 8 Gb process size with it. The 900 MHz Itanium
compares roughly to a P4 on 2 Ghz in performance, only the I/O is much
faster and with 6 Gb RAM it outperformes the 32-bit faster machines as it
does not need to swap memory to disk.

Victor

 

[/QUOTE]
It appears PTC will drop support

"PTC will no longer be supporting the Intel Itanium systems for
Pro/ENGINEER, Pro/INTRALINK and Windchill, effective June 1st, 2004,"

The full story is at:

http://www.theregister.com/2004/06/18/itanium_exit_ptc/

Paul

 

I think ProE uses a couple of 100Mb itself. In my expericene it crashes
at about 1.7Gb