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zeno333 · 06-18-2017, 06:54 PM

I made a a request and the developer said he would look into it...if you want to see a Windows64 bit version of Free42 say so here...let's start the cheering...

Luigi Vampa · 06-18-2017, 07:02 PM

Any noticeable benefits of being 64 bits?

zeno333 · 06-18-2017, 07:04 PM

(06-18-2017 07:02 PM)Luigi Vampa Wrote: Any noticeable benefits of being 64 bits?

Faster...Mathematica in 64 bit is much faster than it's 32 bit version, so Free42 should also be faster...maybe not as much as with Mathematica, but should be significantly faster...

Luigi Vampa · (This post was last modified: 06-19-2017 06:55 AM by Luigi Vampa.)

+ faster (*see note below) :0)
- compatibility :0/

My 2014's laptop is 32W7. I guess ca. 30% of regular PCs are 32-bits Windows today, according to some sources.

I would rather ask for 32 AND 64 bits, but that certainly means some more work to Thomas, so that it is up to him.

[EDIT] *PS: I wonder whether the speed increase would be certainly noticeable for most of the programs the mean user would run on Free42. Number crunching is another game, and Mathematica, Matlab/Octave, etc. do need to lean on 64 bits for the shake of efficiency.

Dave Britten · 06-18-2017, 10:33 PM

Oh good, I was getting tired of only being able to store 2 GB of programs in Free42.

Thomas Okken · 06-18-2017, 11:22 PM

(06-18-2017 07:52 PM)Luigi Vampa Wrote: My 2014's laptop is 32W7. I guess ca. 30% of regular PCs are 32 bits today, according to some sources.

I would rather ask for 32 AND 64 bits, but that certainly means some more work to Thomas, so that it is up to him.

I'll admit that I was surprised when zeno3333 asked about a 64-bit build. So far, the only 64-bit builds that I publish are the ones for iOS and Linux, and that's because on those platforms they are needed: on iOS because of Apple policy, and on Linux because many 64-bit distros don't come with 32-bit support any more.

64-bit seemed unnecessary, because, to paraphrase Rolls-Royce, Free42 is "fast enough."
Then again, if you don't limit yourself to legacy HP-42S programs, but start throwing difficult integrals and large matrices at it, it could become slow. O(n^3) algorithms can do that.

I haven't tried building the 64-bit version yet, because I'll have to get the 64-bit Windows SDK first, and figure out what needs to be tweaked in order to create 64- and 32-bit versions of the Intel lib and the app from the same sources. Once that's done, I'll run some tests, and if there is a significant speed increase, I'll start publishing it on my web site.

N.B. That doesn't mean the 32-bit version is going away. Even though almost all PCs sold over the last decade or more have 64-bit CPUs, there are still a lot of 32-bit CPUs out in the wild, and also a lot of people running 32-bit Windows on 64-bit hardware.

Regarding the question "will it make much of a difference," I think yes, probably. Not for the binary version, but the decimal version uses 64-bit integers heavily (in the Intel library), so that could well speed up significantly... And if it does, maybe I'll also start building the Mac and Android versions as 32/64-bit fat binaries, because why not. :-)

zeno333 · 06-19-2017, 12:43 AM

[quote='Luigi Vampa' pid='74803' dateline='1497815541']
+ faster (*see note below) :0)
- compatibility :0/

My 2014's laptop is 32W7. I guess ca. 30% of regular PCs are 32 bits today, according to some sources.

I would rather ask for 32 AND 64 bits, but that certainly means some more work to Thomas, so that it is up to him.

He said it would be a separate download, so it would be both 32 bit and 64 bit available...

pier4r · (This post was last modified: 06-19-2017 05:04 AM by pier4r.)

(06-18-2017 07:04 PM)zeno333 Wrote: Faster...Mathematica in 64 bit is much faster than it's 32 bit version, so Free42 should also be faster...maybe not as much as with Mathematica, but should be significantly faster...

Interesting, in which cases? If you use 32 bits on a 64 bits machine you are faster with big instructions (and not even that much) , otherwise aside from memory addressing, nothing changes.

Can you link documents about the speed improvements of Mathematica and in which operations?

Thomas Okken · 06-22-2017, 03:23 AM

(06-18-2017 06:54 PM)zeno333 Wrote: I made a a request and the developer said he would look into it...if you want to see a Windows64 bit version of Free42 say so here...let's start the cheering...

Well... I have looked into it, as follows:

I created two VirtualBox VMs on a two-year-old MacBook Pro, and installed Fedora 25 on both. The 32-bit version on one, the 64-bit version on the other.

I built Free42 from the latest publicly available source (2.0.4) on both, and then copied the 32-bit executable to the 64-bit VM.

I ran two tests, with the 32-bit and 64-bit executables, in the 64-bit VM: inverting a random complex 100x100 matrix, and taking the element-wise sine of a random complex 100x100 matrix.

For the first test, the 32-bit executable took 4.1 seconds, and the 64-bit version took 2.3 seconds.

For the second test, the 32-bit executable took 0.27 seconds, and the 64-bit version took 0.18 seconds.

pier4r · (This post was last modified: 06-22-2017 05:29 AM by pier4r.)

I don't think the difference justify supporting two versions.

Unless someone shows use cases where some 2x speed on already low values is crucial.

zeno333 · 06-22-2017, 06:23 AM

(06-22-2017 03:23 AM)Thomas Okken Wrote:
(06-18-2017 06:54 PM)zeno333 Wrote: I made a a request and the developer said he would look into it...if you want to see a Windows64 bit version of Free42 say so here...let's start the cheering...

Well... I have looked into it, as follows:

I created two VirtualBox VMs on a two-year-old MacBook Pro, and installed Fedora 25 on both. The 32-bit version on one, the 64-bit version on the other.

I built Free42 from the latest publicly available source (2.0.4) on both, and then copied the 32-bit executable to the 64-bit VM.

I ran two tests, with the 32-bit and 64-bit executables, in the 64-bit VM: inverting a random complex 100x100 matrix, and taking the element-wise sine of a random complex 100x100 matrix.

For the first test, the 32-bit executable took 4.1 seconds, and the 64-bit version took 2.3 seconds.

For the second test, the 32-bit executable took 0.27 seconds, and the 64-bit version took 0.18 seconds.

About th3e speed gain that would be expected...The Chrome web browser is available in Windows 64 bit, and pretty much the reason is not memory issues, but speed...the makers of Chrome have made great efforts to migrate users to the 64 bit version as has been reported in online news reports...Windows is going 64 bit and the best computer calc out there should also be 64 bit...the speed increase justifies it...For the same reason there is 64 Windows Chrome out there there also should be 64 bit Free42...

Massimo Gnerucci · 06-22-2017, 06:32 AM

(06-22-2017 06:23 AM)zeno333 Wrote: About th3e speed gain that would be expected...The Chrome web browser is available in Windows 64 bit, and pretty much the reason is not memory issues, but speed...the makers of Chrome have made great efforts to migrate users to the 64 bit version as has been reported in online news reports...Windows is going 64 bit and the best computer calc out there should also be 64 bit...the speed increase justifies it...For the same reason there is 64 Windows Chrome out there there also should be 64 bit Free42...

Meanwhile I enjoy my 64 bit Notepad. ;)

Luigi Vampa · (This post was last modified: 06-22-2017 08:33 AM by Luigi Vampa.)

I would place this request in the "non important/non urgent" folder. Maybe in one year time, I would move it to "important/non urgent". But I am not Thomas.
I am afraid "the developer" loves his child so much, that he may do whatever his heart wants. And remember rule #1... "Dad is always right" ;0)

toml_12953 · (This post was last modified: 06-22-2017 09:50 AM by toml_12953.)

(06-18-2017 06:54 PM)zeno333 Wrote: I made a a request and the developer said he would look into it...if you want to see a Windows64 bit version of Free42 say so here...let's start the cheering...

I'd like a 64-bit version for Windows. The iOS version is already 64-bit (if it wasn't it wouldn't be ready for iOS 11) so it shouldn't be too much work for Thomas to create a Windows version.

Thomas Okken · 06-22-2017, 01:18 PM

(06-22-2017 08:20 AM)Luigi Vampa Wrote: I am afraid "the developer" loves his child so much, that he may do whatever his heart wants. And remember rule #1... "Dad is always right" ;0)

Oy, let's not get carried away with the anthropomorphization. :-D

So, anyway, a best-case speed-up factor of about 1.5 or 1.6. I haven't tried nasty functions in INTEG yet, but generally speaking, the speed-up while running programs will probably be less, because the program execution logic doesn't really benefit from 64-bit. (On the other hand, the program execution logic is very simple and pretty efficient, so there's not much there to speed up in the first place.)

Most people will probably never notice the difference, but for those who do actually work with large matrices or numerical computations with poor convergence behavior, more speed is always a good thing.

It is annoying that Windows makes this harder than it should be -- no fat binaries, and no support for running 64-bit binaries in 32-bit Windows, and 32-bit Windows is annoyingly refusing to die. But I'll do it eventually. I don't consider it a priority, though; there are a bunch of things that I consider more important -- I took down the to-do page from my web site, but there is still a TODO file in the source code package -- and this will go near the bottom of that list. Which, if progress goes as I expect, will mean "sometime this year."

pier4r · 06-22-2017, 06:09 PM

(06-22-2017 06:23 AM)zeno333 Wrote: About th3e speed gain that would be expected...The Chrome web browser is available in Windows 64 bit, and pretty much the reason is not memory issues, but speed...the makers of Chrome have made great efforts to migrate users to the 64 bit version as has been reported in online news reports...Windows is going 64 bit and the best computer calc out there should also be 64 bit...the speed increase justifies it...For the same reason there is 64 Windows Chrome out there there also should be 64 bit Free42..

I am not sure you are serious. If yes, could you show us the code of your program that need all this speed on a 42s?

I mean assuming that waiting 10 seconds is not a problem. Maybr you need to wait hours for your results and so 2x speed may help.

Moreover chrome needs 64 bit mostly for memory limits since nowadays web pages are memory hogs, and chrome itself cannot be compared with a 42s