Microsoft and AMD point to another database-centric category: messaging. "Many organizations don’t like to run lots of Exchange
users on a single server, but if you do, a 64-bit platform makes a lot of sense,” says Margaret Lewis, AMD’s commercial marketing
strategist.
Microsoft’s Kelly agrees. “There’s a real benefit [to 64-bit computing] in Exchange in terms of being able to consolidate
servers and mailboxes. It’s also easier to give end-users much larger mailboxes,” he says.
In fact, Microsoft is forcing the issue. Its upcoming Exchange Server 12 will be available only in a 64-bit version, as will
Windows Compute Cluster 2003.
The other principal benefit to the new generation of 64-bit processors is that they add eight additional general-purpose registers
to the x86 design, for a total of 16. All of the general-purpose registers have also been upgraded from a width of 32 bits
to 64 bits. In addition, there are also eight new 128-bit registers, called XMM registers.
Again, for applications and tasks that are not register-intensive, this is not particularly relevant. What is? “Anything graphic
intensive, such as modeling applications for financial markets and the aeronautics industry,” says Red Hat’s Carr. Add technical
applications, including high-performance design, 3-D animation, mechanical CAD/CAE, 3-D rendering, and high-end digital video
editing to the list. Many of these applications also use large data sets and would benefit significantly from the extra memory
addressing.
Digital media management company Agnostic Media has increased media transcoding performance 40 percent following a move to
64-bit Opteron systems. They’ve also seen a 200 percent performance increase for database transactions after moving from Microsoft
SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005, according to CEO Jason Turner.
Similarly, MESoft, another media technology company that offers software and services for the feature film and television
broadcast industries, found it was able to encode, encrypt, and compress high definition media almost in real time on the
64-bit Opteron platform. “Previously, it took six hours to compress one hour of video,” says CEO Mark Kapczynski.
Porting challenges remain
As with any platform migration, moving operating systems and applications to 64-bit processors causes organizations to bump
up against unforeseen issues. For example, the Performance Tuning/Dell testing previously cited actually found decreased query
performance with a 64-bit configuration, which it eventually traced to a flawed Fibre Channel driver. Driver issues will probably
be less severe in server environments than with the plethora of different desktop configurations in many enterprises, however,
and 64-bit versions of Windows ship with a hefty supply of drivers. Still, migrating to the new platform will not necessarily
be as easy as simply ripping and replacing CPUs.
“Thirty-two-bit applications that violate the user kernel space will have trouble running on 64-bit platforms,” says AMD’s
Lewis. "AutoCAD has lots of plug-ins that want to address the same memory as the application. If AutoCAD goes 64-bit, all
those plug-ins will have to be upgraded as well to function properly.”
“The challenge for writing 64-bit code is to make sure it’s actually taking advantage of all the 64-bit performance benefits,”
says MESoft’s Kapczynski. “You need hard-core programmers that really understand memory management, and you have to keep iterating
and testing. It took us three times longer than we expected, but that is the nature of development on a new platform.”
The users we talked to, however, had relatively few problems with their migrations. "We had some issues with Fibre Channel
drivers and with full-text indexing of SQL Server, but they were quickly resolved,” says MySpace’s Whitcomb. “Installing 64-bit
Windows and SQL Server took about a day.”
Agnostic’s Turner agrees. "We had some minor driver incompatibilities, but in my experience, the platform is mature and ready
for prime time.”
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