Fire-Breathing Chips From Intel Set to Turn the World Upside-Down, But in Slow Motion

This is actually, really, truthfully, going to be "insanely great."

In the next few days (maybe by the time you read this), Intel will be trumpeting this and that about its newest 64-bit chip, the 800 MHz Itanium. New? Not hardly. The thing has been in development for over seven years. But is it a breakthrough? Well, yes, albeit in slow motion. Intel says the new chip represents the first member of a family of monster processors that will be around for the next 25 years. Sheesh, 25 years is a long time, especially when you're talking about high technology. But this really is a big deal. It's a whole new architecture, called IA-64 (meaning Intel architecture, 64-bit). Intel says it's "the most significant new development in Intel microprocessor architecture since the 32-bit 386 processor was introduced in 1985." Believe it.

How will this affect us digital video editors? If you're already editing with a real time editing system, your dissolves and many other effects are already displayed immediately after you've placed them on the timeline. Most of that pixel-crunching is done by your video capture card. But if you want to create layered effects, with lots of graphics moving around and interacting with each other, that's where processor power is most important. You're sitting there waiting for rendering, cobwebs forming all around you, just like the good old days, same as it ever was. When I'm waiting for a composite to render, sometimes my mind begins to wander. What if I had a workstation with 32 of those Itanium muthas churning away, chomping through a composite that would normally take an hour to render? I figure that hour-long wait could be reduced to about a minute with these new slivers of supercharged silicon.

But the Itanium isn't even the real thing. Many see this first-out-of-the-gate 64-bit chip as just a trial balloon, a marker that implies what's to come. Yes, folks, the real deal is not this Itanium -- it's Itanium's big brother, waiting in the wings, code-named McKinley. Said to be twice as fast at the same clock speed, McKinley is slated to be introduced in small numbers at the end of this year and shipping in volume beginning early next year. Starting at 1 GHz, McKinley will be the one to watch. Other 64-bit Intel behemoths, code-named Madison and Deerfield, are also being groomed for later release that will be even faster. With the introduction of these new, truly next-generation chips, possibilities open up that change the face of what we do with video. For example, huge bandwidth gains will make uncompressed HDTV editing and compositing child's play for these processors.

There's a catch to all this, though. Applications must be compiled specifically for this new IA-64 architecture. Sure, you'll be able to run your normal 32-bit apps in emulation, but this won't give you any more speed than what you now get with Pentium III/IV and Athlon chips. A huge advantage of this new IA -64 platform is that you can run a variety of operating systems on it, including HP-UX and IBM's AIX-5L versions of Unix, Microsoft's 32-bit Windows XP and the newly-announced 64-bit version of Windows XP. Other 64-bit OSs that will run on the chip are Linux from Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE and TurboLinux. The real fun starts when applications written specifically for IA-64 are released. And if what I saw at last summer's SIGGRAPH is any indication, it won't be long now -- there are a few companies working on this -- namely Discreet, Sonic Foundry (with its Vegas Video 64 application), Messiah Project, NewTek, Next Limit, Reyes Infografica, Right Hemisphere, and Softimage. Looks like a lot of 3D apps to me, with a compositing and/or editing package thrown in here and there. But that was last summer. By now, rest assured there are many more in development that I can't really talk about or their creators would come over here to the Midwest Test Facility and shoot me.

Another catch is that these new chips will be damn expensive. There's talk of the price of the fastest Itanium being in the range of over $4,000 for an 800MHz chip with 4MB of cache. But the lower-end models will cost less. For workstations, Itaniums running at 733MHz with a 2MB cache memory will sell for between $1,000 and $2,000. That's in the same price range as Intel's current Xeon chips. But still, that could get really expensive if you're thinking of populating a motherboard with multiple processors. However, it's not unreasonable considering that some of the editing systems we're using these days cost well over $100K. I say, what's another ten grand spent on chips if the things will make your rendering go ten times faster, if not more?

So what does this all mean for us? Well, first of all, when you hear any blather about different-thinking supercomputers, take that propaganda with a grain of salt. The real supercomputers are about to arrive, and they ain't going to be inside any fruity, different-thinking, insanely great, black turtleneck-wearing cubes, either. Second, the era of affordable, real time, multilayer compositing is on the horizon, thanks to this new firepower. A level of interactivity never seen before is now laid out in front of us. This is actually, really, truthfully, going to be "insanely great."

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Previous Columns
Steal This Song: Napsterization of Video?
Bargain-Basement PC: Cheapness Pays
Buying an NLE: Know What You're Doing
NAB 2001 Wrap-Up
OS X Released: Jump Into The Aqua, Or Off A Cliff?
Not Expensive Enough? Production House Chic
in-sync: Outta Sync?
Windows XP: She's Too Fat For Me
2001: A Look Ahead
2000: Looking Back
Christmas List 2000
What Are We? Video Editors or Computer Geeks?
What Ever Happened to HDTV?
Apple Stock Heads Toward Bottom of the Barrel
Editing for Content
Looking Ahead: The Age of Spiritual Editing?
SIGGRAPH 2000 Roundup
Fix it in the Mix?
NAB 2000 Wrap-Up
Mac? Just Another Pretty Face
The Digital Video Editing Crystal Ball
Thank-You Note to Santa: Thanks for Bringing These NLEs For Me
What's With This 24p Stuff, Anyway?
Digital Video's Pizza Syndrome
HD Video Editing is Here. Now.
Welcome to Digital Video Editing.com

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