If I bought a CRAY super computer will CA be faster?

[Doug Park]

64 Bit Chief will use as much memory as your OS/Hardware can handle. Many systems can't handle more than about 16GB but I would expect that number to climb over time. I doubt that a model that used a full 16GB of memory would be very usable though as it would probably end up being very slow due to the complexity.

We don't test/support on any server products but in theory Chief should work on them because they are based on pretty much exactly the same OS as the high end workstation versions. From what I understand there should be zero advantage of running a server version of the OS unless you are actually running a server.

Windows 7 64 Bit is the way to go with Chief today.

For anyone still on XP that wants to remain compatible with Chief into the future I would recommend upgrading to Windows 7. I would like to drop support of XP when Windows 8 ships but we will probably still support it for X5. I'm going to push for X5 to be the last version of Chief that supports XP but I'm not sure that will fly. If I thought I could get away with it I would push for X4 to be the last XP version.

Every version of OS that we have to support takes some small amount of features away because it takes time to make things work right on all the operating systems. But more than that it decreases the overall quality because of less testing.

From what I'm seeing Windows 8 should be very compatible with software that works well with Vista and Windows 7. Our preliminary tests show that X4 runs flawlessly on it, but things can change.