In article <3C1### [at] videotronca> , Francois Labreque 
<fla### [at] videotronca>  wrote:

>> What is a "streaming application"?
>
> An application that handles huge chunks of data such as mpeg
> encoding/decoding, etc...

Interesting name, I have never seen it before...

In response to the problem my answer then is:

Compression and decompression of data are usually very local (in memory)
operations and thus the processor speed gains you more than memory speed
given the large caches of processors.  Sure, computer companies want you to
believe you need a 10 GHz system to watch DVD movies, but that isn't true...

POV-Ray on the other hand will benefit from more and fast memory as it needs
real random access in memory over the whole memory range if a scene is large
enough.  However, it should be noted that even DDR-SDRAM still has a
specific access time for the first access which isn't much better than the
first access time of SDR-SDRAM (because decoding an address takes about the
same in either type of RAM).  So again you gain quite a bit from large
caches...

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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