Re: Which free software could acquire 48 bits color depth pictures from a scanner ?

nospam added these comments in the current discussion du jour
....

32-bit math has been around since Windows 3.1

32 bit math was available *long* before that.

I believe we are discussing desktop computers and home ran
operating systems.

mainframes certainly did, but if you want to restrict it to
desktop computers, that's fine too. the macintosh was a 32
bit machine since its introduction in january 1984 and
photoshop debuted on the mac in 1990, appearing on windows a
couple of years later with 32 bit math internally on both
platforms.

and cpu bus width isn't the determining factor either. even
on an 8 bit computer, one can do higher precision math, it
just takes more instructions.

one more time, please, isn't what is really necessary is 64-bit
math? and, yes, you are obviously correct that any bit-length math
can be done IF one is willing to spend enough instructions and
enough CPU cycles to fetch the data, compute a result of some
algorithm, then write it back out across the short bus. my point in
an earlier reply was that this is a fairly academic debate since
this isn't either 1984 or 1995, we now have vastly superior HW
architectures, but we are also plagued with O/S and app bloatware
so severe that even Moore's Law is overwhelmed.

At one time, talented programmers hand optimizing assembly code
could wring fantastic performance out of even 8bit CPUs yet now, we
have reached the point where heat buildup prevents any increase in
clock speeds now requiring parallel processing. And, so the saga
continues.

--
HP, aka Jerry

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained
by stupidity!" - Hanlon's Razor


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