Native 64-bit Groundwater Vistas

I know that version 6 of Groundwater Visas is overdue and we are working hard on it. One new thing that will be in Version 6 is a native 64-bit release of our software. This release will have 2 distinct advantages: (1) access to lots of memory, and (2) speed. As a test I ran the benchmark simulation mentioned in my previous 2 posts on the i7-975 using a beta version of GV6-x64. It ran the simulation in 2 minutes 15 seconds or almost twice as fast as version 5 running in 32-bit mode. I think the combination of the i7, 64-bit Windows, and Groundwater Vistas x64 will be a huge step forward in simulation speed.

More on the i7 chip

As I mentioned in my last post, I just built a new system based on the Intel i7-975 chip running at 3.33 Ghz. If you recall from the last post, my benchmark run took 5 minutes 8 seconds on a 2.66 Ghz i7. The same benchmark took 8 minutes 53 seconds on a 3.00 Ghz Xeon system (what I used to think was Intel's fastest processor for modeling). The new system, though, runs the same benchmark in 4 minutes 8 seconds, or about 20% faster than the 2.66 Ghz i7. It's hard to believe this is over twice as fast as a comparable Xeon.

So, if you are concerned about run time, get an i7 system!