Slash LanePhotoshop co-designer Scott Byer said Thursday that his team fully intends to launch a 64-bit version of its popular image editor, but that doing so for the upcoming version included with Creative Suite 3.0 (CS3) would be impractical.
Byer said most Photoshop users are still running operating systems that only support 32-bit memory addressing for each program — including Mac OS X Tiger, which can only assign 3GB per application. This, he says, eliminates the primary advantage of 64-bit technology: memory addressing beyond the 4GB barrier inherent to 32-bit software.
"Let's check all the 64-bit hype at the door," he wrote. "[64-bit apps] can address a much larger amount of memory. That's pretty much it. 64-bit applications don't magically get faster access to memory, or any of the other key things that would help most applications perform better."
In fact, Byer added that most of today's computers would actually incur a performance penalty as the code — which is literally twice the size when accomplishing the same task — would bog down the memory subsystem, reducing the amount of information that could pass through at any given time. Contemporary AMD and Intel processors only occasionally stand to gain from 64-bit code and often see their advantage negated by file caching.
The Adobe developer particularly rules out Mac development of a 64-bit edition of Photoshop CS3, blaming Tiger's fundamental 32-bit restrictions despite its selective 64-bit elements. "Many of the libraries an application would need to be fully 64-bit aren't available. So, on the Macintosh side," he wrote, "the answer [to the likelihood of a 64-bit version of Photoshop CS3] is zero."
While Byer says that he would love to update his company's star program and take advantage of more than 4GB of memory, he admits that the time spent on 64-bit technology would be better used for polishing the Universal Binary for Mac users and adding features that would be more immediately appreciated by artists looking to upgrade from earlier versions. However, he promises that a 64-bit edition is all but inevitable when more computers start using the greater memory space.
"It's a when, not an if," he wrote.
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Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
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71 Comments
Another edict from the Adobe Attitude Division I see. Wonder what the extra caffeinated coder drinks are spiked with over there?
Another edict from the Adobe Attitude Division I see. Wonder what the extra caffeinated coder drinks are spiked with over there?
I didn't read much 'attitude' into his comments ... unless there's a new definition for pragmatic that I haven't heard about yet.
Thank goodness someone is talking reality with regards to 64-bit. It's silly hearing about how 64-bit is some sort of panacea. Everything the Adobe rep said is exactly spot-on. Kudos!
On the other hand, Leopard WILL be a 64-bit OS, and Photoshop users are likely to be some of the first to demand more than 3-4GB from a user-facing app, so hopefully we won't have to wait until CS4.
Hmmm, 64 bit code is a little larger than 32 bit code (for AMD64 vs x86) as there is a prefix byte for 64-bit instructions. On the other hand the extra registers in AMD64 often counteract this increase as you need less loads and stores. Typically a 64-bit application will be a small bit larger, but certainly not twice the size. Of course you also have compiler maturity to account for - it could be that generate 64-bit code is less size-efficient.
And as for 64-bit pointers, yes, they'll increase the code size a little bit (IIRC AMD64 is 48-bit pointers anyway). 64-bit integers? Only if you need them, you can still use 32-bit integers.
Now the arguments regarding 32-bit operating systems are actually true, and also for image work 64-bit integers aren't useful, SIMD instructions are and AMD64 only adds extra registers for these, and 64-bit addressing is useful when you have >2GB images - and a decent application specific mechanism for managing files of this size is probably just as good a mechanism to use right now.
CS3 is not out until Spring when Leopard comes out - why should we deliver you maximum performance to match your hardware when we could save a few bucks and sell you 75% of the performance match and in 2 years, sell you an upgrade to 100% - of course, then I'm sure Apple will be on 16-cores but their version of CS will only be able to access 8 cores so never mind that 100% match thing.
Basically, its what do we care what YOU want - you're just the user, we're Abobe.
You will take what we offer and like it.
They thought the 4-minute launch and 2-minute to see a transition Adobe Premiere was good enough for the Mac video market - rewrite the code - pawshaw, next thing, you'll want to call it imovie and give it away for free when we charge $499 for the priviliedge ...
If there was no MS, Adobe would win the crown for longest time between apps for no real reason - and like the new CS, instead of making it 64-bit, they spent all this time appreantly re-doing the icons ... good choice of time usage.
It's one thing to be arrogant if you over-deliver what people expect but to always be two years late (that OSX version, yea, it's coming) just because? I think you might just be asking for Apple to release a PS killer and then ...