Adobe passes on 64-bit code in Photoshop CS3
Photoshop 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.
Responding to questions from users about a lack of 64-bit support in the latest Photoshop CS3 beta, Byer in his official blog pointed out that many of the perceived benefits of 64-bit computing simply won't manifest themselves with current generations of hardware and software.
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.
Responding to questions from users about a lack of 64-bit support in the latest Photoshop CS3 beta, Byer in his official blog pointed out that many of the perceived benefits of 64-bit computing simply won't manifest themselves with current generations of hardware and software.
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.
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
Plus, his whole spiel about the Mac is intentionally stupid since CS3 will correlate in time with Leopard. Talking about Tiger's lack of true 64bitness is a red herring.
Time was when Photoshop was a leader because you needed the latest gear to run it correctly. Now, ironically, when it is most relevant in the era of the death of film, Adobe is making it lame.
That to me is the more pressing question, given that many of us will be buying such Macs this spring with CS3.
Only the Mac Pro addresses enough memory now to accommodate 64 bit programs. That is a small market at this time.
Leopard won't have significant sales compared to Tiger for at least a year, perhaps more.
Pros and shops don't rush out to embrace a new OS.
Remember he did say "when", not "if".
Don't be in such a hurry.
Almost no one here will benefit.
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 ...
You pretty much summed up my anger towards adobe's lack of respect to their customers. But they do things like this because their product will still be bought regardless of how much better it is than cs2. Well the new news is macman2790 passes on buying another adobe product.
Photoshop 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.....
"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."
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
Accessing extra memory may not speed up some apps but with more and more Photoshop users editing RAW files, I would think that, with numerous history states and cache levels set in preferences, being able to use more than 3GB of RAM for caching (and less instances of going to the the scratch disk) would be very helpful.
I posed this question to one of the Photoshop programmers and he reminded me that CS2 (and CS3 beta) are able to conjur up more than 3GB cache by "asking" OS X Tiger to grab unused memory for bonus cache area. I was able to demonstrate this by setting the cache preference to 100MB. When I opened and rotated a 300MB file, the total memory usage jumped to over 7GB. Photoshop CS2 was the only user app running. It could be called "silent partner" caching. Apple's Motion 2 does the same thing if you do a RAM Preview render of multiple projects.
A well-thought out, decently updated Adobe CS3 full suite will be the best thing for Apple from Adobe for now. Addressing more than 3GB is cool but creatives/ producers can work around that in various ways. In any case Final Cut Pro and Motion are strong options for video peoples anyway.
I am very much looking at this in terms of what's best for Apple. Adobe CS3 Universal roll-out from April 2007 to coincide with Leopard (to some degree) and Leopard and Parallels supporting BootCamp/ Virtualization for Vista, looking good for the April-May-June 2007 quarter.
Looking down the line, the next upgrade, Adobe CS4, will be let's say April 2009. By then pretty much everything will be 64-bit, 8-10GB could be mid-end, 12GB - 16GB could be max supported on PC prosumer desktop, iMac, MacBookPro.
An arithmetic progression of RAM spec'ed* doubling every year, would show:
2001 - 64mb RAM
2002 - 128mb RAM
2003 - 256mb RAM
2004 - 512mb RAM
2005 - 1gb RAM
2006 - 2gb RAM
2007 - 4gb RAM
2008 - 8gb RAM
2009 - 16gb RAM
2010 - 32gb RAM
*Market forces, not necessarily "What are we gonna do with all this RAM???"
2008 to 2009 will be the year(s) of 64-bit. Let's say you have a PC/Mac with 6GB of RAM (mind-boggling to think of, but look at the yearly progression I showed above) ... 1GB to system, 4.5GB to major application (3D, others????) and 512mb to misc applications, this scenario starts to make sense.
2010 - 32GB RAM. Awwww YEAHHHH.
Accessing extra memory may not speed up some apps but with more and more Photoshop users editing RAW files, I would think that, with numerous history states and cache levels set in preferences, being able to use more than 3GB of RAM for caching (and less instances of going to the the scratch disk) would be very helpful.
I posed this question to one of the Photoshop programmers and he reminded me that CS2 (and CS3 beta) are able to conjur up more than 3GB cache by "asking" OS X Tiger to grab unused memory for bonus cache area. I was able to demonstrate this by setting the cache preference to 100MB. When I opened and rotated a 300MB file, the total memory usage jumped to over 7GB. Photoshop CS2 was the only user app running. It could be called "silent partner" caching. Apple's Motion 2 does the same thing if you do a RAM Preview render of multiple projects.
I think for 2007 and 2008 this workaround works well for Adobe CS3 and Apple applications. I'm thinking start of 2009 for full 64-bit apps to really start taking off, based on my projections on average mid-high-end computer RAM market specs.
As a side note, if Adobe CS3 is not multi-threaded, that would be really freakin' tragic. But maybe not sooo much, because one would have different apps going at once, but given CS3 will be the latest up to about middle of 2009, you'd want the software to make the most of your 2 to 4 to [16/32 cores in 2009].
People will use Adobe CS3 in many different ways, and there's a lot one can do with CS2 and Macromedia Studio 8 right now for 2007, even 2008.
But we're discussing the bleeding edge here. It's sharp, but lean and mean. Apple Macs are there. I hope Adobe CS3 will be too.
Now about this drivel that 64bits won't make any difference - rubbish. Adobe apps are RAM hungry beasts, and if they cannot access RAM they start hitting the hard disk(s). As Adobe will point out themselves - RAM is faster than a scratch disk. So how they can now turn around and claim that more RAM won't make a difference is baffling.
The most they can claim is that it won't make a difference for customers who don't work on large files. Even so, Adobe is pushing RAW support for each new version of Photoshop, and created a new file format (PSB) for saving files larger than 2gig. There is clear indication that people are starting to use larger files with more filters and layers all the time. Yet this guy is insisting that people don't need to use the extra memory that a 64bit app can offer. Sure, customers are often stupid and don't really understand what it is they need, but if there is a clear trend for using larger files they really can't brush this off.
I expect the real reason they don't want to add 64bit support is that it is going to be a major rewrite of the code and it'll be a nightmare to make it work on both Windows and Mac OS X.
As an example even though Photoshop 7 had support for 16bits per channel colour support, it wasn't until Photoshop CS 2 until all the filters and adjustments supported this colour depth (actually, there still might be some that don't work). Likewise, it wasn't until Photoshop 7 that some of the blur filters worked on files which were larger than 500MB.
Cross-platform compatibility and grotesquely old legacy code are the main things which are stopping development of Photoshop these days.
2007: Buy CS3 because it's a Universal Binary that will work great with your Intel Mac
2009: Buy CS4 because it's a 64-bit app that will work great with your average 8GB RAM Mac running 10.7.x.
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.
Although there are not as many After Effects user than there are Photoshop users, I think the people that use After Effects and other Video software would much more appreciate a 64-bit version that allows them to use 3-4.
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.
...
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 ...
JBelkin - you are so right! 64-bit has not been a rumor, it's been available, so why hasn't Adobe been working this for CS3? See above for the answer. Adobe is just like MS, milking their cash cow.
Adobe DEFINITELY the NEW Quark
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 ...
Well said.
Lemon Bon Bon