I've been looking through the boards off and on for several days now. There are so many posts it's highly possible I missed it.

I love the GPU processing, but would like to get my CPUs faster, too.

So, what I am hoping for is a SETI version that utilizes the 64 bit capability of Vista. It would appear to me that SETI work units should process somewhat faster if they were coded to run 64 bit as well.

Is this a reality I can download now, or, perhaps, even a possibility I can hope and wait for?

By the way, I guess you could call me an "old-timer", since I've been around since November of '99. Well, after all these years, I recently had the most wonderful opportunity to meet Matt Lebofsky (at work on the brand new hardware, by the way).

I always knew myself, but for any Doubting Thomases out there we often see complaining about this and that, I can assure you both Matt and the SETI project are the "Real Deal". Matt's quick notes he takes the time to put in after a long, hard day don't come close to showing the technical and scientific expertise he and the others really have. If you had a chance to talk to Matt one-on-one like I did, I am sure you would be very pleased with all the things he would love to do for the project if he had 20 or 30 clones of himself.

I've been programming professionally in multiple languages since '74, so I've seen just about everything, yet Matt truly impressed me!

I just thought I'd pass that on for those few posters we have who are rather rude at times because they don't get -exactly- what they want -exactly- when they want it. Of course, the vast majority of our SETI family are like me, i.e., exceedingly happy to be part of such a wonderful project.

Sorry for the digression, but I just -had- to pass that on. Keep up the great work, Matt!!!!!

Oh, and by the way, thank you to anyone who can help me with my original question! :)

I don't recall the exact wording but Seti@home doesnt get a major boost from 64bit OSes. There is a minor boost IIRC from loading the WU using the 64 bit OS however the calculations done by Seti are maxxed out with the 32 app.

There are several threads that were started in the numbers crunching Q&A about this but I can't seem to find them right now

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

This "64 bit capability" of CPU & OS is referring to integer instructions.

SETI uses floating point calculations usually utilizing SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions)

The SSE registers are 128-bit so four 32-bit single-precision floating point numbers are processed with one instruction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 

Ah, so SETI is totally floating point calculations. I had hoped there would be some integers in there that could benefit from 64 bit.

Oh, well, it was worth a try.

Thanks to both of you so very much for answering my question!

Ah, so SETI is totally floating point calculations. I had hoped there would be some integers in there that could benefit from 64 bit.

Oh, well, it was worth a try.

Thanks to both of you so very much for answering my question!

Of course it is not 100% Floating Point, but it is on the upside of 95% Floating Point.

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