Pu-239 wrote:Bah, just get an Opteron and get 4+ GB of RAM
. Of course cost is a problem, but you CAN get one. Then again, for your 20000x20000 you'll need 22GB
ok nevermind.
Well, there are some memory tricks that Photoshop does in order to preserve your computer's sanity, but it is still a lot of space at 32bpp.
And RAID would need something like 100 disks(~8000$) (no redundancy, and would be horribly unreliable) to match 700MB/s (rough estimate based on copying 64MB file from one ramdisk to another(might need to be doubled), and my computer is 5 years old). How much RAM can you buy w/ 8000$ at today's prices? Probably a lot more than 22GB (whether or not you can put it in the computer is another issue)
I've heard of some crazy RAID 3-3-0 implementation for the old Crays that sustained over 300MB/sec ... and those drives are over ten years old. As for transfer rates, some Ultra320 15K drives can sustain over 60MB/sec alone.
Too bad photoshop doesn't run on Linux and Win64/AMD64 isn't out (is Photoshop available on Itanium?)
Photoshop runs on Linux via Crossover. I'm not sure how much memory it supports on OS X (which doesn't have the 4GB limitation). Photoshop is not on AMD64 or IA64, but I suspect that will change at least for the former.
I thought SCSI wasn't supposed to tax the CPU ?
SCSI doesn't, ATA hasn't since the ATA33 standard was out.