Thanks for your input folks.

Well I finally located the info I needed to tip the scales. It came from a thread in the AdobeLabs forum for After Effects, and was posted by the moderator who I believe works for Adobe, Adolpho Rosenfeld.

here's a link:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforu...&enterthread=y

After Effects CS3 will have a new feature to take full advantage of multicore processing for as many cores as you will have on your machine:

"If you go to Preferences > Multiprocessing you'll see a checkbox called 'Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously'."

"What this means is: besides taking advantage of multiple cores/processors for many things, CS3 adds the ability to simultaneously feed all available processors with a frame to process at the same time. In most projects, this means a gigantic increase in speed for both RAM previews and Render Queue renders."

"Bear in mind you'll need at least half a gig of RAM per core. In dual core systems, you'll need 2GB of RAM or more. For quad machines, maybe 4GB is a good starting point. For eight headed monsters, you'll want at least 6 gigs."

I'm very glad I ran into this discussion, because I discovered that I was not allowing for enough memory in my plans. I had only planned on 4 GB. But now I will plan to go ahead with dual Clovertown 2.0 or 2.33 Ghz processors, since one of the apps important to me can benefit from it, and I will load up with 6 or 8 GB of FB-DIMMs.

Thanks again for the discussion. It's turned into a real learning experience. When the system is all put together and running, I'll let you know how it turns out.

Stephen

3 gig limit
 

Am I missing something I thought Windows Xp only could see 3 gigs of ram. Can you have more then 3 Gigs and the application will see it but windows won't? How does that work?

When Im in Either PPRO2 or AFX Im close to the 32 bit 3 gig limit in mem usage as is.(HD)
Using AFX with Nucleo with so many cores has proven ugly results.
When CS3 comes out Ill go 64 and double the ram

The 3 gig limitation is an XP problem, not a 32 bit limit. The 32 bit limit is 4 gigs.

I'm confused about the Adobe post saying "Bear in mind you'll need at least half a gig of RAM per core. In dual core systems, you'll need 2GB of RAM or more. For quad machines, maybe 4GB is a good starting point. For eight headed monsters, you'll want at least 6 gigs." Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't that equal 1 gig for dual core, 2 gigs for quad core and 4 gigs for 'eight headed monsters'?

These ram figures seem ridiculous to me. Why would adding more processing power require more RAM when you're still working on the same CONTENT? I can see that larger projects would require more ram, but I can't understand why adding another processing core would increase that need. This sounds about as uninformed as the computer magazines saying "one dvd burner is good, but two is better, or at least put a cd or dvd reader in the second bay". Why do gaming systems need dual DVD burners? They never explain that part, just 'more hardware is better'.. This whole RAM thing seems like a big scam brought on by the RAM manufacturers the way the Red Cross is a pyramid scheme created by Dracula.

Eric

I don't think it's going to be that easy, Salah. Rosenfeld assured me that CS3 is not optimized for 64 bit operating systems and was not planned to be. A beta tester who was having some problems getting PPCS3 to run properly in a 64 bit OS (XP 64 as I recall) was told that his concerns were not a priority for the development team becasue his OS was "not certified" for use with CS3. Now that was the case for PPro. I don't know how uniform the whole CS3 Production Premium suite is on that point, but my assumption is that all are being optimized for the same OS limitations. How else could they have nearly seamless integration?

Since CS3 is optimized for 32 bit operation and not 64 bit, it does raise a big question mark about the memory limitation. At least for PCs. But one of the distinctive features of CS3 is that it is intended to be a cross platform app suitable for Macs as well as PCs. Could it be that the memory limits might be different on a Mac? I am going to ask them about that.

In the meantime, I am going to have to do some more hard thinking about how I want to configure this monster. It ain't over yet! One thing is for sure, if 32 bit XP can only tolerate 4 GB RAM, then that has to be my limit until I switch to a 64 bit operating system. And THAT will have to wait for these apps to catch up.

How long do you think it will be before Adobe comes out with its first service pack for this new suite, or the entire Creative Master? 3 months?

You could always run XP 64 and run 32 bit apps. But I dunno if Intel has made them work smoothly on a 64 bit OS? I know AMD was the first to do that. Then you could run more than 4 gigs of RAM, and still use the apps that are currently available.

The XP limit is 3 gigs, not 4. So you could buy 4 gigs, but be stuck at 3.

I would look into whether the Intel cpu's will run 32 bit apps on a 64 bit OS with any slowdowns.. If there's no problem, then you're all set. I think the Itanium II is alright doing that, but I don't know offhand about the other chips.

Eric

So maybe you can have your kate and edith too..

Eric,

WinXP has a memory limit of 4 GB. You need to set a switch in your boot.ini to enable that. Applications can then use a maximum of 3 GB of RAM, while XP uses the remaining 1 Gb for housekeeping. If you were to use XP64, you could use 8 GB of Ram or even more. The 32 bit applications are still limited to 3 GB. However if you multi task Premiere and AE, each application can use 3 GB each. All Adobe software is 32 bit and for the time being they have not shown any interest to adapt this to 64 bit. CS3 will run under XP64 and thus will benefit in multi tasking from the extended RAM available.

Multi core support has been improved in CS3 and in July Intel plans the next price reduction. I can still wait a couple of months, but if I had to invest now, I would go for two E5355 CPU's. (Clovertown quad core Xeons). Probably in Q4 2007 the new Seaburg/Penryn will be available, with another price reduction of the current CPU's.

The price for a Quad Q6600 will drop to around $ 266, the Quad Q6700 will be around $ 530, just to give you an indication.

I heard back from Rosenfeld on the problem of CS3 being a 32 bit app and the memory limit this imposes. Here is his reply:

"I have good news and bad news... which ones first?
Ok, bad news: Windows XP 32 bit is actually limited to 3.6 GB visible to client applications, not 4 GB :) Multiprocessing will take as much as it can.

Good news: CS3 applications *will* run in Win 64 systems just fine. The problem at this time is more the lack of drivers (scanners, editing cards, ASIO drivers, etc) than the applications themselves. In Win 64, AE and its' kingdom of background processes will eat as much RAM as you can feed it (to be accurate, 3.5 GB per process on Mac OS and 4 GB per process in Win 64). So in an 8 core system, you could easily take advantage of 16 GB or more."

So if I'm willing to live with a bit of instability in certain apps until the drivers all catch up, I could go ahead with the plan for the dual quad and 6-8 GB of RAM, and run XP64 as Eric suggested. From the standpoint of AE performance in particular we're good to go on that.

Now I need to make sure that I don't ace out my need to run Avid Liquid 7.2.

Oh yeah, there's that annoying problem of drivers.

I was reading last night about the switches to get to 4 gigs and things can be a bit unpredictable with some apps apparently.

Will these programs actually benefit from that much ram? It's been my experience that most programs have an amount of ram, whatever it may be, that they need to work with, and beyond that is just there for whatever. Maybe these projects are way larger than I've ever worked on, or the apps are poorly written, but 16 gigs of ram seems silly. :)

Agreed, unless you have a mobo like this:

Who else is hungry? :)

I have a dual Clovertown E5355 workstation with the Tyan S2696 Board and 4GB of RAM, ATI Radeo x1950Pro. I will be installing a RT.X2 as well.

After Effects with Nucleo renders scarily fast. I am looking forward to CS3 and After Effects' multiprocessing, probably making Nucleo (I don't have pro) redundant.

But please ask any questions about this setup and I'll try to answer.
One thing to beware of is that the chips run at 120W each, and the FB DIMMS also get very hot, so you need to sort your quiet cooling out. I haven't quite done that yet to my satisfaction, still tinkering with fan speeds.

Try to remember that each and every one of those extra processes working in parallel to render frames is going to need its own input/output memory buffers for feeding/holding the result.

Okay, but still, the math doesn't work out. They say a half gig per core and then the math falls apart there. :)

When they say "at least" (which you omitted) and then provide estimates that are higher than that, I assume they are buffering their bare minimums. Don't forget to allow 1 gig for the OS. So a dual would need 2 gig, a single quad 3 gig (4 is better for multi-threading) and an octo would need 5 as a bare minimum, 6 giving a bit of headroom.

That's my take on what he said. But he also pinted out that in a 64 bit OS environment, AE and company will use all the ram you can give it.