Re: Upgrading an HP Z1

On 2/20/2024 1:37 PM, sticks wrote:
> On 2/19/2024 8:12 PM, Paul wrote:
>> 
>> I never would have guessed some CAD, would be such a memory pig :-)
> 
> The program being used is Mastercam.  I think it's probably what most people in the machining industry use.
> 

Their recommended memory is 32GB.

   https://www.mastercam.com/support/technical-support/system-requirements/

which to me, seems a bit ambitious. In fact, that's a danger signal
that we should look up how the software works.

   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ten-design-softwares-every-molder-should-know-plastic-mould-ivy-cao-

      "Mastercam is a CAD/CAM software based on PC platform developed by CNC Software Inc.
       in United States. It integrates multiple functions such as two-dimensional drawing,
       three-dimensional solid modeling, surface design, voxel stitching,              <=== mentions voxel
       numerical control programming, tool path simulation and realistic simulation.
      "

A software could use polygons for representation of a piece of work. Or it could use voxels.

Polygons could "benefit from a good graphics card".  Voxels, perhaps not as much of a card is required.

Voxels are basically a 3D pixmap, which is very
consumptive of memory, and increasingly so when you "crank" the
precision knob on the tool. That can multiply the memory
requirement... by a lot.

   "He had showed me the problem he was having when he would force it to render
    the drawing after making changes on certain variables.  Like going from 0.01 to 0.0005.
   "

In three dimensions, using voxels, that results in a factor of 8000. Now, the program
is hitting the pagefile (or, the functional equivalent of a pagefile).
Some companies do not like the behavior of the system paging, so they
write their own paging and have a separate file used for paging. On
Microsoft ICE, when working on a large panorama, they used a separate
2TB hard drive just for "private paging". If your job was big enough,
the prompt would change to "connect a 6TB hard drive to finish the job".

From the system requirements again:

   "NVMe Drive with at least 20GB free"

While a program can pretend its paging algo is I/O limited, this is
seldom true. A lot of paging methods, are CPU bound, and the delays
involved don't always make sense (the delays can be a lot longer than
any reasonable person would think). While they can casually mention an
NVMe, again, this is material for Task Manager, and watching how
a "job execution" unfolds. You would watch Task Manager memory tab,
while changing your job from 0.01 to 0.0005, to see what the proportionality
factor was. You would also start watching the disk I/O tab, if you
see the storage LED coming on a lot while the job is rendering.
To get some idea whether the SATA SSD is flat out at 530MB/sec or
whatever. (Note that Windows ability to measure things, isn't
all that accurate.)

You can put an NVMe into a non-NVMe computer, but then it is generally
not the boot drive. For example, you could put the MasterCad paging
file on a separate NVMe data drive. But I would only be doing that,
if there was some indication that paging used "unlimited I/O speed".
I would estimate it's been about fifteen years, since I saw an I/O limited
paging method at play. Today, using 14000MB/sec PCIe Rev5 storage, isn't
going to make a dent in the problem. Just a waste of electricity.

(this is just to demonstrate, you can have NVMe on a separate card...
 Don't actually buy one of these. The card may not show up in the BIOS,
 which means it does not support booting. But can function as a data device.)

   https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie4-card-21-m2-ssds-168tb-31gbps

I've seen computer paging algos that are so poor, the disk I/O
rate is 1.5MB/sec. And that would not even tax my year 2000 hard drive :-)

I used to have a subscription to Computer Graphics magazine, even though
I wasn't designing graphics hardware. Voxels were introduced a long time
ago, and well before their usage would have been practical. And even at the
time, they might discuss "how could we compress these, to reduce resource
requirements". That's why I cannot estimate the proportionality factor,
and I assume they've "bent the curve" a bit while inventing this stuff.

And generally speaking, large problems are not handled well by your
average piece of software. Usually, developers struggle to get accuracy
from a method, and performance "is, whatever it is". There usually isn't
time for optimization.

When Vista was released, the file copy operations hadn't been fully tested.
To give you some idea how "green" software can be :-) By Vista SP2, it was
in pretty good shape by then. So they called it Windows 7.

   Paul