Windows XP 64 PCI GPIB driver

[gallen70]

My interest in XP 64 is more or less pure morbid curiosity. I wanted to see what the system could do if there were any performance increased running a 64 bit system. I understand there won't be much of an increase in performance running 32 bit applications on the new system but I wanted to see if an existing system which can run XP 64 would show an increase in capability. Another thing I learned from it is who is going to support it, which, in the end became the real reason for this little exercise. I learned what I needed to know.

[Jason Birch]

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@JoshuaP wrote:
Windows XP 64 is not exactly an upgrade for the current Windows XP and we imagine it will take some time before it is adopted. Even though XP 64 is capable of running most 32 bit applications, you will see little benefit in performance with 32 bit applications and Windows XP 64 is not going to support any 32 bit kernel drivers.

Here is a link to an interesting review on the performance benefits of XP 64.
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/x86-64/x86-64-1.html

In order to utilize the capabilities of Windows XP 64 it will require that every hardware driver in the system be ported and modified to support 64 bit operating systems and you will have to find a way to create a 64 bit application. Current software like LabVIEW 7.1 and MSVC 7.1 will not give you a 64 bit applications and therefore you stand to see very little benefit from actually having a 64 bit OS with most of the current development environments. In addition, if your applications doesn't require more than 4GB of memory and you are not doing mathematical computations that are larger than a 32 integer, note the floating point arithmetic is the same for XP and XP 64, you would still see very little benefit from using XP 64 with a 64 bit application and driver.

However, National Instruments is currently investigating Windows XP 64 and it is a good possibility that it will be supported in the future, but there are no current beta drivers available. The speed at which it is supported will be largely dependent on the amount of valid customer requests and the number of customers that will be using Windows XP 64. From what I understand XP 64 is expected to release sometime around the middle of the year, but it will only be an option on some of the larger server and workstations.

If you can, please give me some more information about you application and how you plan to use to develop the application. Why do you feel that you need Windows XP 64 support?

Joshua Prewitt
National Instruments

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Sorry to ask this in such an old thread for a different device to what we are using, but it's the only one I could find relating to 64-bit support and contained pertinant questions.

We have a mapping product that works with scanned large format aerial images in the 750MB - 1.2GB range. We use the PCI 6601 to interface our handwheels with the PC so the user can move about in stereo by turning the handwheels.

Because the images are so large (and you need to display two at once for stereo support), having more memory available to the application is always an advantage because it allows a larger portion of each image to be kept in memory at once.

Under 32-bit Windows, the maximum memory that can be used by an application is 2GB -- which, given the size of the images, obviously doesn't leave much room for anything else if you want to minimise disk activity. (It is possible to use a boot.ini setting to increase this to 3GB -- unfortunately this is still not enough to completely eliminate the need to page image data to disk.)

Even if the application remains 32 bit, simply by running it under Windows XP 64, it has access to a full 4GB of memory -- enough in our case to make memory a non-issue, and a US$400 investment in 4GB of RAM an extremely attractive proposition.

In addition, once we recompile the software with the new version of Visual C++ to make it 64 bitl, there are other advantages, too -- 64 bit mode doubles the number of floating point registers to 16, so there are advantages even for floating point arithmetic, and it also doubles the number of general purpose registers to 16 as well, greatly increasing the usable number of general purpose registers, which benefits even code that has no need for 64 bit integers.

We have customers who bought Athlon 64 systems who would dearly love to upgrade their PCs to Windows XP 64. The only thing holding them back now is the PCI 6601 driver.

Has National Instruments made any progress on this, and are there beta drivers available?

Thanks,
Jason.

[JasonSmith]

Hi Jason,

As far as beta drivers for your PCI-6601, you could apply for the NI-DAQ beta program at www.ni.com/beta.  I cannot guarantee that there is currently a beta program in progress for the drivers you are interested in, but this would be the correct method to obtain beta drivers.

I would recommend that you visit our Product Suggestion Center at the link below in order to let National Instruments know of your interest in these drivers:
http://digital.ni.com/applications/psc.nsf/default?OpenForm&temp1=&node=

[Jason Birch]

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@JasonS wrote:
Hi Jason,

As far as beta drivers for your PCI-6601, you could apply for the NI-DAQ beta program at www.ni.com/beta.  I cannot guarantee that there is currently a beta program in progress for the drivers you are interested in, but this would be the correct method to obtain beta drivers.

I would recommend that you visit our Product Suggestion Center at the link below in order to let National Instruments know of your interest in these drivers:
http://digital.ni.com/applications/psc.nsf/default?OpenForm&temp1=&node=

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Thanks Jason, I've applied for the beta program (and am awaiting approval) and have submitted the request on the Product Suggestion Centre link.

Cheers,
Jason.

[rpoffen]

I would like to add my voice for requests to support 64bit. I do have a legitimate need. Xp64 may not be a real upgrade (no real performance benefit), but it DOES eliminate the 2GByte process addressing limit, and this is what I am interested in.

I have found drivers for all my hardware easily enough, more and more devices are supporting drivers for 64bit, and more and more PC's are 64 bit capable (AMD Athlon 64, Opteron, Intel with Em64t). My project had a custom inhouse designed PCI card that I wrote the original 32bit driver for. It took me all of 4 hours to port and fully test the driver under 64bit.

The one sticking point in being able to deploy this is that we need GPIB, and NI is not delivering. I can see that consumer adoption of 64 bit may be a while, but I think in business or embedded applications that 64 bit will be more popular, and that is where GPIB is needed.

[ScottieB]

I want to encourage the community to keep discussing the 64-bit version of XP on this thread.  The information and various customer use cases are valuable to making decisions regarding this technology.  At this time, however, I don't believe that there are any drivers that have true XP 64 bit support in customer beta (I could be wrong about other drivers, I techincally speak only for GPIB). We are actively working on solutions for this and other newer Windows technologies.

It seems that the 4GB+ memory limits are the most attractive feature to posters so far.  Anyone else?

Scott B.
GPIB Software
National Instruments

[rpoffen]

I certainly see other large companies that make PC hardware supporting 64bit, some have been for a long time. Most of the bigger video card makers do (ATI, NVidia, etc). Even an older USB to serial adapter have 64 bit drivers. I have a nearly two year old Dell Precision 470 workstation, and it runs XP 64, and I can find ALL the drivers for it, including network, audio, video and chipset.

I would have thought that NI would be more proactive. With Vista coming out next year, which will also support 64 bit, seems like now is the time to get started.

[gallen70]

This is why I asked in the first place.  It is frustrating to see that Windows has had a beta for over a year to allow people to get ready for this then XP 64 is released and there are still companies out there that act shocked that there is a new operating system.  Usually with technology if wait until there is an obvious demand then someone else probably has the solution.  Why has NI waited to do anything? Is NI doing anything or is NI still thinking about it? 

[ScottieB]

I wanted to solicit opinions and discussion on this thread so that we can understand who will be using 64-bit and what applications require it.  While XP x64 does ship on some systems, it's is not undergoing a huge Microsoft rollout like Windows XP was or Vista will be.  It is targeted to a specific group of users.  The number of people who truly need/use 64-bit support is still small.  Generally, it seems people want it for 4GB limit reasons.  I apologize for giving the impression that we were waiting to decide what to do on 64-bit support.  As I said above, we are actively working on this in various NI groups.  We're far from "shocked that it exists."

Scott B.
GPIB Software
National Instruments

[Jason Birch]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for looking into this.

I think the holdup in the "rollout of x64" has really been caused by the lack of drivers, so I'm afraid we're in a bit of a catch-22 situation here. Almost all new PCs have 64-bit CPUs -- even notebooks shipping with Turion64 CPUs are 64 bit now! -- and whether or not there is a "need" for 64 bits is like asking whether or not there was a "need" for Windows 95 or Windows XP. There is no question a 64 bit system is better -- even if you aren't banging your head against the 2GB (not 4GB) limit of 32-bit Windows (as we are), 64 bits also bring with it cleaner code (the baseline system is no longer a 20-year-old 80386 but is instead a 64 bit CPU with 16 GP registers, 16 FP registers, and SSE-2 as standard) and performance that ranges from a few percent higher up to more than twice the speed (e.g. encryption and file compression) because native 64 bit integers (as used in encryption and compression algorithms) allow 64 bit quantities to be used directly rather than requiring additional housekeeping instructions to allow them to be emulated in 32 bits.

If you are hitting the 2GB limits, of course, then the desire to upgrade is even more urgent. With the latest 3D graphics cards now shipping with 512MB of RAM on them, that often chews up 1GB of your limited address space (0.5GB of address space for the card's memory plus about 0.5GB of address space and physical RAM for the same texture data kept in main memory) so even people playing the latest video games are feeling the pinch.

The change to x64 is inevitable (and as I understand it Vista will ship as both and install the appropriate one based on your hardware) and I'm already annoyed that we had to wait two years for Windows XP x64 Edition to be released after the first 64 bit CPUs hit the market, so as you can understand I'm a little frustrated that we are still being held back today by a lack of compatible drivers!

Cheers,
Jason.