More bits are better

Frame rates are going up, images are getting bigger, and more of them are in color. This is placing ever greater demands on the PC in your machine vision system, which is why you need to think about moving to a 64 bit OS. I mentioned previously that Windows Vista comes in 32 bit and 64 bit flavors; apparently Windows 7 (coming soon,) is the same.

So maybe you’re wondering what a move to 64 bit computing means. There’s a great article on this subject in the July/August issue of Advanced Imaging magazine. (It doesn’t seem to be on their web site yet, so the link takes you to their home page. Search for “Moving Vision to 64 Bits” by Yvon Bouchard of Dalsa.)

The bottom line is that a 32bit OS limits your memory to 4Gb whereas once you move to 64bit it’s almost unlimited. If 4Gb sounds like ample, think about a high speed line scan application that uses an 8k color sensor. You can quickly run out of space to put those images!