Sorry Bruce but that's the price you pay for having a dinosaur app the size of a brontosaurus. Had you *maybe* considered cleaning up the code or starting a brand new product to replace Photoshop, you wouldn't be in this mess today.
How long can Photoshop keep using its current codebase?
One day, a completely native app is going to leapfrog Photoshop with clean code. That day is probably closer than ever.
I agree.
Maxxon have a version of cinema 4d ready to go.
Luxology have a version of Intel 'Modo' ready to go.
It only took an Apple engineer a week to knock up 'Funhouse' which blew Photoshop away for real time filter functionality.
When people start seeing what Core Image and Video can do...Adobe better wake up.
Photoshop feels slower, feature bloat and...nothing that groundshaking anymore. Same old filters too.
I wish Apple had bought Painter when it was doing the rounds. Roll in a bit of shake and you have a nice app?
I like Photoshop. But I sometimes question Adobe. Have they brought in core image? Will they? They could. But if Vista doesn't have it. 'X' won't. That's the feeling I get.
It's going to be interesting. Adobe are on code warrior? So, they'll have to move to X-Code. Who knows...Photoshop may sweat off some of the fat...on the way over to X-Code.
regarding photoshop: okay, not really. regarding GraphicConverter. I wonder if that'll be updated for intel? it seems to be severely, severely carbonized, and i know it has been around forever, so is probably packed with legacy code.
encrypted chat: Skype encrypts everything, voice and text. i even sent credit card info over it one time. go skype!
One day, a completely native app is going to leapfrog Photoshop with clean code. That day is probably closer than ever.
Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on that. (Sorry, I'm sitting in my cube thinking about Office Space.)
Graphics apps are practically a dime a dozen. Photoshop, PSP, Gimp, Argon/Cobalt/Graphite, HP/Intel/Kodak camera packages, xv, etc. And yet, none of these are as successful as Photoshop. If it were so easy just to write a completely new application, native, from scratch, that did everything Photoshop did, and better, we'd have it by now.
Most people don't realize the shear volume of code that actually goes into a production-quality app. It's not something that a profitable company will just whimsically throw away over night.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do, mind you. As a young, forward-thinking software engineer, I would love to believe that I could blow away the competition if I put my mind to it. But, it's going to take a little more than someone "just" writing a cleanly-coded app.
Of course, by definition, you are right that the day an app leapfrogs Photoshop is closer than ever, assuming that day exists, since time is always moving forward. But, let's not be unecessarily philosophical.
Most stuff I've been doing on a 1.8Ghz G5 iMac completely whups a 1.7Ghz Pentium M. Especially Photoshop running native on both. Alien Skin filters, stuff like that. Not even close. I get 3 to 5x speeds out of the iMac at some things. The Pentium M wins on others though.
So a 2Ghz G4, which has better Altivec and double the cache than the G5 and better vector code than SSE on the Pentium M would be better still.
Rosetta will not get anywhere near close as it doesn't emulate AltiVec. About 70% of a theoretical 2Ghz G3 is what you'd expect on a good day.
I don't agree because the chips Intel has out now are not the chips Apple will be using. First, the current Pentium M easily beats the G4 in most all catagories. Second there is no 2GHz G4 other than the clocked boards from Powerlogix, so don't count on them yet.
The dual core Yonah will be competing at up to 2.33GHz 2MB L2 (65nm) shared cache with the 7448 at perhaps 1.8GHz. Maybe the G4 will be at 2, but that's just hopeful guessing at this time, nothing more. Yonah is expected to be around for a short time as the 64 bit Merom comes in the second half of 2006.
There will be no comparison between these and the G4 at that time. The Yonah will outrun the G4 by a good 50%, and the Merom by another 20% - or more. SSE3 will be supported.
Rosetta may or may not take advantage of dual core. We don't know that yet. But you can be sure that Apple will do all it can to ensure that it will run as efficiently on two cores as possible. Certainly better than on a one core G4.
It's certainly going to be an interesting time for a lot of apps.
I think that some companies are going to have to look at a major upgrade in order to maximize their products. The service I sell was DOS based only for a long time - then it was necessary to look at Windows. It took a decision to make the investment and some thought was put into that decision. (No chance for a Mac based version - aghhhh!) I'm hoping that Adobe can take a 5 - 7 year approach in determining the viability of investing in the efforts to do a first rate job - I believe that investment would pay off over time.
The one app I am looking at more than anything else is VPC. MS has a chance to work some magic here in their MBU and I look forward to seeing what they do.
It's certainly going to be an interesting time for a lot of apps.
I think that some companies are going to have to look at a major upgrade in order to maximize their products. The service I sell was DOS based only for a long time - then it was necessary to look at Windows. It took a decision to make the investment and some thought was put into that decision. (No chance for a Mac based version - aghhhh!) I'm hoping that Adobe can take a 5 - 7 year approach in determining the viability of investing in the efforts to do a first rate job - I believe that investment would pay off over time.
The one app I am looking at more than anything else is VPC. MS has a chance to work some magic here in their MBU and I look forward to seeing what they do.
Yeah. That's what I was thinking when teh Steve said it was real easy for Cocoa apps.
I was sat their thinking of all the apps I used and how the majority of the big ones are Carbon. All of Adobe's, all of Macromedia's, Microsoft Office and a fair chunk of Apple's even including iTunes.
I can't see me shifting till there are some faster intel processors than today's G5s AND we've got OSX 10.5 plus the above software native.
Just a question or two from a non-Mac programmer.
1) Doesn't XCode allow you to write/compile Carbon apps as well as Cocoa apps?
2) If above is 'yes', then shouldn't carbon apps in XCode be tranmorgified to intel binaries as easily as Cocoa apps?
3) Finally then, assuming 1 and 2 answers to 'yes', shouldn't the talk of Carbon apps being difficult to port really be changed to Carbon/CodeWarrior apps being difficult to port.
Oh, and I love how some people think all Adobe should have been doing all these years is just keep re-writing their code from scratch to go along with the latest programming environment. Sure, no problem. "Let's toss our code and rewrite for Cocoa. No one's going to care that certain parts that always worked before now don't, because once we tell them its Cocoa, they'll go nuts!"
Plus, converting a cross-platform app to cocoa is a lot harder when there's no 'Yellow-box' for windows, like Apple originally promised. Oh, and if you don't think cross-platform is important, just wait until those pre-press shops start yelling that the work they did on their mac doesn't look the same as it does on the windows version.
Oh, and I didn't read that like the guy was whining about how hard it was to convert. He was just stating a fact. Its not as easy as some of you "Hey, it'll just take a couple of weeks! This will be the easiest transition ever!" seem to think.
1) Doesn't XCode allow you to write/compile Carbon apps as well as Cocoa apps?
2) If above is 'yes', then shouldn't carbon apps in XCode be tranmorgified to intel binaries as easily as Cocoa apps?
While xCode will compile both languages, this has absolutely nothing to do with converting between the two. Converting is completely manual and involves rewriting pretty much everything.
Keep in mind, cocoa was designed from the very start to be platform agnostic from a programmer's perspective. It was purposefully abstracted from hardware. Carbon is the exact opposite and heralds from a time when writing for a specific platform was seen as neccessary to eek out more performance.
I don't think adobe or apple is doing anything unusual here. Both are trying to preemptively set the public's expectations for how quickly and somoothly the transition will go. Both have been pretty tame in their public comments IMHO. Apple says it won't be that bad. Adobe says that apple is sugar coating things. I don't think either party holds a grudge against the other. We're just seeing run of the mill commentery.
As far as coding practices go, Adobe is held in higher regard than Quark. However, the photoshop code base is aging and the time is approaching when it will have to be majorly overhauled... or end up like Quark.
Since a lot of apps will run faster on a Pentium M than on a G3 (the G4 and G5s beat the Pentium (M) mostly in areas where Altivec is used), this 80% might have to scaled by a factor of let's say 1.5, meaning you end up with 120% performance (alas only for non-Altivec apps). For Altivec-heavy apps this 80% drops down to 10% perhaps, so you would get 15% performance.
i do love statistics . Did you know that 4 of 10
numbers are false because of false statistic sources?
Slight correction, this comparison would have to be scaled by the difference between a native app on a 2 GHz dual-core Pentium M and a native app on a 2 GHz G3.
If the app runs on a G3 as fast as on a G4 then Rosetta would deliver about 80% (I have heard different numbers, but it must be around that) of the performance on a Pentium M where a native app would run as fast as on the G3.
Since a lot of apps will run faster on a Pentium M than on a G3 (the G4 and G5s beat the Pentium (M) mostly in areas where Altivec is used), this 80% might have to scaled by a factor of let's say 1.5, meaning you end up with 120% performance (alas only for non-Altivec apps). For Altivec-heavy apps this 80% drops down to 10% perhaps, so you would get 15% performance.
Nonsense. A Pentium M beats a 7447a with no problem. The performance of the 7448 is maybe 10-15% better.
Everyone had better wake up here. Apple won't be using Dothans in its machines they will be using Yonah's. At 2.33GHz dual core 2MB L2 shared cache 533-800MHz bus. At most six months after that Merom.
Stop this silly comparison between to be shortly discontinued chips from Intel which Apple will never be using, and new chips from Freescale which aren't even out yet. and until we KNOW that the 7448 will be arriving at speeds over the announced maximum 1.8 GHZ, stop assuming that they will be at 2GHZ.
Of course VPC or a similar application will be necessary.
There's two ways that the Intel Macs could run Windows without it that both suck.
1) Dual booting. If you just after running games though, maybe not so bad.
2) Merom/Conroe is supposed to support virtualization so you could run Windows alongside MacOSX as you do now in VPC but without VPC.
Neither solution would allow integration with MacOSX, no HFS+ filesystem support, no clipboard support, no windowed support more than likely either. Virtualization would make VPC an awful lot easier to do but VPC does more than just run Windows in it's own little sandbox.
I only use VPC to run IE6 to check which bits of a website design break in it but other people like to cut and paste between windows apps and Mac apps running concurrently. That still has to work.
Nonsense. A Pentium M beats a 7447a with no problem. The performance of the 7448 is maybe 10-15% better.
But it doesn't at everything and in particular areas it's not a fraction slower but multiples slower. Those areas may not matter to you. That's from Photoshop to iTunes that I've been running where I've found those multiples, and those matter to me. Intel may have better integer performance but the M is poor at floating point and vector. Whilst most things feel snappy, every now and again you hit up against something that takes 3x as long. When you do, it feels inexplicably slow if you're working cross platform.
And then there's the G5 and desktop Pentiums anyway. If we're after speed, you don't run your stuff on a crappy laptop with slow CPUs, slow memory, slow FSB, slow drives, slow GPU and ropey little screens. Intel or PPC, no matter so your argument is beside the point. Laptops are great but you don't buy them as rendering engines. Adobe's target customers aren't doing their work on laptops for the most part.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Everyone had better wake up here. Apple won't be using Dothans in its machines they will be using Yonah's. At 2.33GHz dual core 2MB L2 shared cache 533-800MHz bus. At most six months after that Merom.
Those figures sound great don't they. But the bus is quad pumped, the pipelines are longer, the 2MB cache is a patch up job because the cache misses are so bad that keeping stuff in the cache just in case is the only way to get performance out of a register starved design. It's comparing Apples and Pears. The architectural differences don't translate like that in a simple spec sheet comparison. Merom, in 64bit compares more directly but Apple are only doing 32bit intel so far! Xcode generates old skool IA32 code.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Stop this silly comparison between to be shortly discontinued chips from Intel which Apple will never be using, and new chips from Freescale which aren't even out yet. and until we KNOW that the 7448 will be arriving at speeds over the announced maximum 1.8 GHZ, stop assuming that they will be at 2GHZ.
ok, that's laptops again and we don't know that Apple will be using dual Yonahs, singles, Meroms or whatever either and at what speeds. So speculating which of the unreleased chips Apple may or may not use or which would be faster is silly on both sides. But we do it anyway.
We also don't know what they'll be sticking in a PowerMac which is more important for Adobe users than laptop chips but it's got to beat a dual 2.7Ghz G5 if you're a Pro user. Yonahs won't get close to that. Neither will Merom. Just as you don't expect G4s to do it either. Conroe might or the workstation/server class chips Intel have in the roadmap for later. But we don't know yet.
However, until there's native apps, I don't think Rosetta running PPC Photoshop will be acceptable to Pros for more than just fiddling about. 70-80% of a G3 just doesn't cut it for media apps even if we're talking a theoretical dual 2.66Ghz G3. I wouldn't be surprised if a 2.0Ghz iMac running native PPC Photoshop wouldn't still beat Rosetta on a dual 2.66Ghz Intel (or whatever top speed they come out with). The difference between a G3 and G4 at the same speed was quite phenomenal at some apps. Power users are really going to miss Altivec in the Rosetta emulation so getting native apps out quick is going to be important to them or they'll be better off sticking with G5 PowerMacs even with Intel Macs twice as fast at integer apps.
Mixing native and emulated on the same Intel PowerMac is going to be fun too. Could you imagine switching from native Intel QuicktimePro doing a file conversion to importing it in to AfterEffects running G3 Rosetta emulation. It'll be like driving an F1 car onto marshmallow.
Interestingly, Adobe have already converted their UI frameworks to MacOS on Intel. And released them as open source.
They did that back in July. So Bruce is saying one thing whilst his engineers are doing another which is usually the case IME of CEOs. Expect the same crappy cross platform non standard interface on MacOS Intel too though. Let's just hope their Eve2 framework maps better onto OSX than previously. CS2 at least looked nicer than previous attempts.
But it doesn't at everything and in particular areas it's not a fraction slower but multiples slower. Those areas may not matter to you. That's from Photoshop to iTunes that I've been running where I've found those multiples, and those matter to me. Intel may have better integer performance but the M is poor at floating point and vector. Whilst most things feel snappy, every now and again you hit up against something that takes 3x as long. When you do, it feels inexplicably slow if you're working cross platform.
And then there's the G5 and desktop Pentiums anyway. If we're after speed, you don't run your stuff on a crappy laptop with slow CPUs, slow memory, slow FSB, slow drives, slow GPU and ropey little screens. Intel or PPC, no matter so your argument is beside the point. Laptops are great but you don't buy them as rendering engines. Adobe's target customers aren't doing their work on laptops for the most part.
Those figures sound great don't they. But the bus is quad pumped, the pipelines are longer, the 2MB cache is a patch up job because the cache misses are so bad that keeping stuff in the cache just in case is the only way to get performance out of a register starved design. It's comparing Apples and Pears. The architectural differences don't translate like that in a simple spec sheet comparison. Merom, in 64bit compares more directly but Apple are only doing 32bit intel so far! Xcode generates old skool IA32 code.
ok, that's laptops again and we don't know that Apple will be using dual Yonahs, singles, Meroms or whatever either and at what speeds. So speculating which of the unreleased chips Apple may or may not use or which would be faster is silly on both sides. But we do it anyway.
We also don't know what they'll be sticking in a PowerMac which is more important for Adobe users than laptop chips but it's got to beat a dual 2.7Ghz G5 if you're a Pro user. Yonahs won't get close to that. Neither will Merom. Just as you don't expect G4s to do it either. Conroe might or the workstation/server class chips Intel have in the roadmap for later. But we don't know yet.
However, until there's native apps, I don't think Rosetta running PPC Photoshop will be acceptable to Pros for more than just fiddling about. 70-80% of a G3 just doesn't cut it for media apps even if we're talking a theoretical dual 2.66Ghz G3. I wouldn't be surprised if a 2.0Ghz iMac running native PPC Photoshop wouldn't still beat Rosetta on a dual 2.66Ghz Intel (or whatever top speed they come out with). The difference between a G3 and G4 at the same speed was quite phenomenal at some apps. Power users are really going to miss Altivec in the Rosetta emulation so getting native apps out quick is going to be important to them or they'll be better off sticking with G5 PowerMacs even with Intel Macs twice as fast at integer apps.
Mixing native and emulated on the same Intel PowerMac is going to be fun too. Could you imagine switching from native Intel QuicktimePro doing a file conversion to importing it in to AfterEffects running G3 Rosetta emulation. It'll be like driving an F1 car onto marshmallow.
Interestingly, Adobe have already converted their UI frameworks to MacOS on Intel. And released them as open source.
They did that back in July. So Bruce is saying one thing whilst his engineers are doing another which is usually the case IME of CEOs. Expect the same crappy cross platform non standard interface on MacOS Intel too though. Let's just hope their Eve2 framework maps better onto OSX than previously. CS2 at least looked nicer than previous attempts.
You really are overdoing this. There have been enough tests published to show that your statements about relative speed are wrong. I've used PS, since that's what you are useing here as an example, since it first came out. I've used it an average of perhaps four hours a day five, and sometimes six days a week. I've also been beta testing it since version 1.0.2. I've done this on both platforms, though I'm a Mac user, and bought Macs, for the most part, for my company for this purpose.
I, and others, have found that for the past several years, both Macs and PC's are about equal. In some areas the Mac is faster, in other, the PC. Neither platform can claim a win anymore. I don't know of any filter in which, and we WERE talking about the Powerbook when we started, the Mac can claim several hundred percent speed gain. Which ones are you talking about? I don't have a PC here, but I'm sure others can run a test on them if you mention it.
You misstate certain technical aspects. It doesn't matter if the bus is quad pumped, octuple pumped or not. It's still much faster. No one agrues that the G4 bus is very slow. Not even Apple. This is a known problem. Going from a 167MHZ bus to a 200MHZ bus will do almost nothing. The G4 has been known to be bus limited for years. If they moved to a 400MHZ but it would help. And what are you talking about pipelines for? What does that have to do with anything? The cache is fine. One of the deficiencies of the PPC cpu's is the small caches. With the slow bus a large cache has a disproportional affect on performance. With a fast bus the performance increase is less. But a big cache will still make a difference. The Xenons have large multi MB L2 and L3 caches. It adds up to 30% of the performance of the chips. Not because cache hits are poor.
We know that Apple will be using Yonahs and Meroms at the highest speeds. We also know that Applw will use whatever the competition is using. You're being coy here. We also know that they won't be using the Intel chips that you are using here in your comparison.
Yonah and Merom are mobile chips. Haven't you gotten that yet? You want to discuss workstation and server chips?
We know Intel's roadmap because they just showed it to everyone. You can bet your bipple that none of these companies are going to make the same mistake they made going to 90nm.
Sheesh. Where are you getting these numbers from? The G3 and G4 are exactly the same except for Altivec. What your are missing here is that the current Pentium M is as fast as a much faster P4 in most tasks. The Yonah and Meroms will be faster yet per clock, as well as having a higher clock. SSE3 will be much better than SSE2 and benefits from the faster clock as well.
Intels workstation chips will beat the pants off those.
All of this will wait for the actual machines. Until then we won't be able to do more than guess A good guess is that PS on a hi-end Mactel Powerbook will perform about as well as the latest PPC Powerbook at the time. Maybe a bit slower in some things maybe not.
Of course VPC or a similar application will be necessary.
There's two ways that the Intel Macs could run Windows without it that both suck.
1) Dual booting. If you just after running games though, maybe not so bad.
2) Merom/Conroe is supposed to support virtualization so you could run Windows alongside MacOSX as you do now in VPC but without VPC.
Neither solution would allow integration with MacOSX, no HFS+ filesystem support, no clipboard support, no windowed support more than likely either. Virtualization would make VPC an awful lot easier to do but VPC does more than just run Windows in it's own little sandbox.
I only use VPC to run IE6 to check which bits of a website design break in it but other people like to cut and paste between windows apps and Mac apps running concurrently. That still has to work.
Necessary and preferred are two different things. If you want to run Win software and games, it might not be necessary. Possibly it will run native at full speed.
If, as you say, you want to cut and paste that would be different. You might also run WINE or Crossfire (I think that's the name).
You really are overdoing this. There have been enough tests published to show that your statements about relative speed are wrong.
But I'm sat here WITH an Acer Pentium M laptop that will only encode in iTunes at about 6x speed and a copy of Photoshop on it that will apply some filters to images about 2x slower than my 1.8Ghz G5. On average sized images for the web I can work almost in realtime on my Mac whereas moving a slider on the Acer makes me wait a few seconds.
A DVD transcode took about 3 hours on the G5 and 5 on the Acer using the same software - mencoder.
It's not a lemon of a laptop as it does well in tests. Not superfast but you pay a lot more for 2.xGhz Pentium Ms.
Both have a GB of ram. The Windows laptop actually feels faster than my G5 in use but Windows usually does.
So what gives here?
I'm not clueless here - crap, I was certified Windows developer from back as far as pre-release NT and I wouldn't touch a Mac till OSX because the OS was a joke. My shelf still has MSDN disks on it. But I'm really not seeing similar performance out of a Pentium M for some tasks. It's not a bad CPU, don't get me wrong, but it's missing media functionality in the same way the G3 Macs were.
And the Photoshop shootout on ArsTechnica bears some of this out too. Pentium M gets trounced...
So do G3 because they don't support AltiVec. Maybe Photoshop uses SSE3 on the desktop chips?
But anyway, this is off the topic. I really don't care about laptops! The issue is when Adobe are going to have native apps so that we're not running G3 emulations and when are we going to get machines that are faster than our current desktops. It's pointless 'upgrading' to an Intel Mac if Photoshop runs faster on a G5 or faster on Windows. I'd guess that when Adobe get a native Intel version out, Apple may have PowerMacs out that Pros may want to use instead of G5s.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
You misstate certain technical aspects. It doesn't matter if the bus is quad pumped, octuple pumped or not. It's still much faster. No one agrues that the G4 bus is very slow. Not even Apple. This is a known problem. Going from a 167MHZ bus to a 200MHZ bus will do almost nothing. The G4 has been known to be bus limited for years. If they moved to a 400MHZ but it would help. And what are you talking about pipelines for? What does that have to do with anything? The cache is fine. One of the deficiencies of the PPC cpu's is the small caches. With the slow bus a large cache has a disproportional affect on performance. With a fast bus the performance increase is less. But a big cache will still make a difference. The Xenons have large multi MB L2 and L3 caches. It adds up to 30% of the performance of the chips. Not because cache hits are poor.
I won't disagree there at all, but large caches just aren't as important to the PPC as they are to Intel, especially the Pentium4, less so with the M, so you're comparing Apples and Pears again. And in any case, The G5 FSB is way, way faster than anything there which is why Pros use desktops lot laptops.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
We know that Apple will be using Yonahs and Meroms at the highest speeds. We also know that Applw will use whatever the competition is using. You're being coy here. We also know that they won't be using the Intel chips that you are using here in your comparison.
We don't know anything here. The developer boxes use Pentium 4 and integrated graphics even. And again you're back on laptops? Repeat after me - Desktops for Pros, Laptops for people who don't put speed as No1 priority.
However, if Adobe don't get native software out in a timely fashion then comparing chips is going to be pointless as we'll be comparing software under emulation. There will be no reason to upgrade to a new Intel PowerMac unless it runs the software you need faster than today's G5. Windows will always run the adobe software faster till it's native and quite possibly afterwards too if Apple haven't got as good a compiler or Adobe/Apple have made a hash of it.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Yonah and Merom are mobile chips. Haven't you gotten that yet? You want to discuss workstation and server chips?
I know. But why do you keep going on about them? The article is about software, not laptops. I know we've been bitching about G5 laptops every Tuesday for years but there are other fruit you know.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
We know Intel's roadmap because they just showed it to everyone. You can bet your bipple that none of these companies are going to make the same mistake they made going to 90nm.
So did Freescale. Your point is? Call me cynical but IBM, Freescale, Intel and AMD all miss their roadmaps.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Sheesh. Where are you getting these numbers from? The G3 and G4 are exactly the same except for Altivec.
Yes, and that makes all the difference for some tasks! I had a 500Mhz g3 and a 400Mhz G4 at the same time. The G4 was much quicker most of the time.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
What your are missing here is that the current Pentium M is as fast as a much faster P4 in most tasks.
It's not. The 2.x Dothans are getting there but you've got to clock them past 2.5Ghz to approach the fastest P4 and Athlons. And they cost about the same too so there's no real advantage other than heat and noise.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
The Yonah and Meroms will be faster yet per clock, as well as having a higher clock. SSE3 will be much better than SSE2 and benefits from the faster clock as well.
Intels workstation chips will beat the pants off those.
SSE3 really isn't that much better than SSE2 and neither are as good as AltiVec.
Intel's current workstation chips are also extremely expensive and get beaten by the PowerMac today.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
All of this will wait for the actual machines. Until then we won't be able to do more than guess A good guess is that PS on a hi-end Mactel Powerbook will perform about as well as the latest PPC Powerbook at the time. Maybe a bit slower in some things maybe not.
Who the fudge cares about Powerbooks for Photoshop use? I just don't get it. If you're a Pro you want a fast desktop. If you need to be mobile, you live with slower computing and less resources. If you need speed and Adobe haven't graced us with a Mactel version then you're stuck with a fast G3 emulation or you boot into Windows . If you're on a desktop then the G5 will continue to beat Intel for some time yet regardless of native software.
That's what I was getting at. Transition is only going to be smooth if you can get native versions of your main apps. 2007/08 is going to be that time when Intel PowerMacs are faster than G5s, there's native software and everyone's saved up enough cash to buy new versions of everything.
Nonsense. A Pentium M beats a 7447a with no problem.
I have not said f***g otherwise. I, out of my head, said that for non-Altivec tasks the Pentium M is 50% faster than a G4. That number is naturally quite arbitrary but it certainly fits your description that the 'Pentium M beats a 7447a with no problem'.
But nobody is talking about that comparison, since there won't be any Pentium M native version of Photoshop running on a Mac for about a year. You see, I don't care how fast Photoshop runs under Windows because using Windows is simply not an option for me.
I am talking about how Photoshop runs on G4s compared to what it would run under Rosetta on a Pentium M.
If you need to be mobile, you live with slower computing and less resources. If you need speed and Adobe haven't graced us with a Mactel version then you're stuck with a fast G3 emulation or you boot into Windows .
My computing life revolves around multitasking, I have currently 25 running apps in my Dock. Booting into Windows is the least thing I would do (waiting several minutes to boot back and forth and quit and restart all the programs and not being able to use other apps while you do this just to save a few seconds on an image manipulation? One would be crazy to do this.), using an Intel-native version of VirtualPC would be an option maybe however.
No, the only question for me is, should I get the last high-end G4 Powerbook, or should I wait for the Intel-Macs? And since I
a) Don't want to wait that long for an upgrade.
b) Just want to get a G4 despite of it
the last reason
c) Photoshop on an Intel-Mac might run even slower than on G4 troughout 2006
But I'm sat here WITH an Acer Pentium M laptop that will only encode in iTunes at about 6x speed and a copy of Photoshop on it that will apply some filters to images about 2x slower than my 1.8Ghz G5. On average sized images for the web I can work almost in realtime on my Mac whereas moving a slider on the Acer makes me wait a few seconds.
A DVD transcode took about 3 hours on the G5 and 5 on the Acer using the same software - mencoder.
It's not a lemon of a laptop as it does well in tests. Not superfast but you pay a lot more for 2.xGhz Pentium Ms.
Both have a GB of ram. The Windows laptop actually feels faster than my G5 in use but Windows usually does.
So what gives here?
I'm not clueless here - crap, I was certified Windows developer from back as far as pre-release NT and I wouldn't touch a Mac till OSX because the OS was a joke. My shelf still has MSDN disks on it. But I'm really not seeing similar performance out of a Pentium M for some tasks. It's not a bad CPU, don't get me wrong, but it's missing media functionality in the same way the G3 Macs were.
And the Photoshop shootout on ArsTechnica bears some of this out too. Pentium M gets trounced...
So do G3 because they don't support AltiVec. Maybe Photoshop uses SSE3 on the desktop chips?
But anyway, this is off the topic. I really don't care about laptops! The issue is when Adobe are going to have native apps so that we're not running G3 emulations and when are we going to get machines that are faster than our current desktops. It's pointless 'upgrading' to an Intel Mac if Photoshop runs faster on a G5 or faster on Windows. I'd guess that when Adobe get a native Intel version out, Apple may have PowerMacs out that Pros may want to use instead of G5s.
I won't disagree there at all, but large caches just aren't as important to the PPC as they are to Intel, especially the Pentium4, less so with the M, so you're comparing Apples and Pears again. And in any case, The G5 FSB is way, way faster than anything there which is why Pros use desktops lot laptops.
We don't know anything here. The developer boxes use Pentium 4 and integrated graphics even. And again you're back on laptops? Repeat after me - Desktops for Pros, Laptops for people who don't put speed as No1 priority.
However, if Adobe don't get native software out in a timely fashion then comparing chips is going to be pointless as we'll be comparing software under emulation. There will be no reason to upgrade to a new Intel PowerMac unless it runs the software you need faster than today's G5. Windows will always run the adobe software faster till it's native and quite possibly afterwards too if Apple haven't got as good a compiler or Adobe/Apple have made a hash of it.
I know. But why do you keep going on about them? The article is about software, not laptops. I know we've been bitching about G5 laptops every Tuesday for years but there are other fruit you know.
So did Freescale. Your point is? Call me cynical but IBM, Freescale, Intel and AMD all miss their roadmaps.
Yes, and that makes all the difference for some tasks! I had a 500Mhz g3 and a 400Mhz G4 at the same time. The G4 was much quicker most of the time.
It's not. The 2.x Dothans are getting there but you've got to clock them past 2.5Ghz to approach the fastest P4 and Athlons. And they cost about the same too so there's no real advantage other than heat and noise.
SSE3 really isn't that much better than SSE2 and neither are as good as AltiVec.
Intel's current workstation chips are also extremely expensive and get beaten by the PowerMac today.
Who the fudge cares about Powerbooks for Photoshop use? I just don't get it. If you're a Pro you want a fast desktop. If you need to be mobile, you live with slower computing and less resources. If you need speed and Adobe haven't graced us with a Mactel version then you're stuck with a fast G3 emulation or you boot into Windows . If you're on a desktop then the G5 will continue to beat Intel for some time yet regardless of native software.
That's what I was getting at. Transition is only going to be smooth if you can get native versions of your main apps. 2007/08 is going to be that time when Intel PowerMacs are faster than G5s, there's native software and everyone's saved up enough cash to buy new versions of everything.
Despite your denials, this discussion was started with a comparison between PPC Powerbooks and Mactel Powerbooks (or whatever they will be called).
It was between G4's and whatever Apple would be using instead. Rosetta performance being based on that. From the last line of the report:
"It has been reported that Apple holds one final PowerPC-based PowerBook G4 update that should debut this fall."
We aren't talking about G5's, except in the unlikely chance that Apple will use them for this last PB update. We are talking about Powerbook performance.
You may not want to talk about it. That's fine. Then limit your discussion to something else. As I said, if you want to talk about workstations, fine . But don't mix the chipsets, and compare the M Dothan to the Dual G5's. No one else is doing so.
Also, you may not keep with things, but more work is being done on PB's all the time. I know quite a few pro's from my own dealings through my company who do most of their PS work on a portable.
If you have such performance differences, I suggest that you have problems of your own with your equipment.
Again, it's a poor comparison to compare a laptop with a tower. Compare your 1.8GHz G5 with the same price PC tower and come back here. You will be rather disappointed.
There is no point in discussing this any further until you understand what the discussion is about, and can make the proper comparisons.
Laptop use by pro's is a VERY common thing. Both for PS and video editing. Maybe you're not a full time pro and so don't have to work under the same conditions. But I can tell you that many pro's work on location with laptops. More all the time. You're dismissing that is something I can't understand.
With digital having almost completely taken over the professional market in catalog, fashion, and studio product photography, laptops are becoming ever more important.
Comments
Sorry Bruce but that's the price you pay for having a dinosaur app the size of a brontosaurus. Had you *maybe* considered cleaning up the code or starting a brand new product to replace Photoshop, you wouldn't be in this mess today.
How long can Photoshop keep using its current codebase?
One day, a completely native app is going to leapfrog Photoshop with clean code. That day is probably closer than ever.
I agree.
Maxxon have a version of cinema 4d ready to go.
Luxology have a version of Intel 'Modo' ready to go.
It only took an Apple engineer a week to knock up 'Funhouse' which blew Photoshop away for real time filter functionality.
When people start seeing what Core Image and Video can do...Adobe better wake up.
Photoshop feels slower, feature bloat and...nothing that groundshaking anymore. Same old filters too.
I wish Apple had bought Painter when it was doing the rounds. Roll in a bit of shake and you have a nice app?
I like Photoshop. But I sometimes question Adobe. Have they brought in core image? Will they? They could. But if Vista doesn't have it. 'X' won't. That's the feeling I get.
It's going to be interesting. Adobe are on code warrior? So, they'll have to move to X-Code. Who knows...Photoshop may sweat off some of the fat...on the way over to X-Code.
Lemon Bon Bon
regarding photoshop: okay, not really. regarding GraphicConverter. I wonder if that'll be updated for intel? it seems to be severely, severely carbonized, and i know it has been around forever, so is probably packed with legacy code.
encrypted chat: Skype encrypts everything, voice and text. i even sent credit card info over it one time. go skype!
Originally posted by kim kap sol
One day, a completely native app is going to leapfrog Photoshop with clean code. That day is probably closer than ever.
Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on that. (Sorry, I'm sitting in my cube thinking about Office Space.)
Graphics apps are practically a dime a dozen. Photoshop, PSP, Gimp, Argon/Cobalt/Graphite, HP/Intel/Kodak camera packages, xv, etc. And yet, none of these are as successful as Photoshop. If it were so easy just to write a completely new application, native, from scratch, that did everything Photoshop did, and better, we'd have it by now.
Most people don't realize the shear volume of code that actually goes into a production-quality app. It's not something that a profitable company will just whimsically throw away over night.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do, mind you. As a young, forward-thinking software engineer, I would love to believe that I could blow away the competition if I put my mind to it. But, it's going to take a little more than someone "just" writing a cleanly-coded app.
Of course, by definition, you are right that the day an app leapfrogs Photoshop is closer than ever, assuming that day exists, since time is always moving forward. But, let's not be unecessarily philosophical.
Sorry this is completely off-topic.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
Really?
Most stuff I've been doing on a 1.8Ghz G5 iMac completely whups a 1.7Ghz Pentium M. Especially Photoshop running native on both. Alien Skin filters, stuff like that. Not even close. I get 3 to 5x speeds out of the iMac at some things. The Pentium M wins on others though.
So a 2Ghz G4, which has better Altivec and double the cache than the G5 and better vector code than SSE on the Pentium M would be better still.
Rosetta will not get anywhere near close as it doesn't emulate AltiVec. About 70% of a theoretical 2Ghz G3 is what you'd expect on a good day.
I don't agree because the chips Intel has out now are not the chips Apple will be using. First, the current Pentium M easily beats the G4 in most all catagories. Second there is no 2GHz G4 other than the clocked boards from Powerlogix, so don't count on them yet.
The dual core Yonah will be competing at up to 2.33GHz 2MB L2 (65nm) shared cache with the 7448 at perhaps 1.8GHz. Maybe the G4 will be at 2, but that's just hopeful guessing at this time, nothing more. Yonah is expected to be around for a short time as the 64 bit Merom comes in the second half of 2006.
There will be no comparison between these and the G4 at that time. The Yonah will outrun the G4 by a good 50%, and the Merom by another 20% - or more. SSE3 will be supported.
Rosetta may or may not take advantage of dual core. We don't know that yet. But you can be sure that Apple will do all it can to ensure that it will run as efficiently on two cores as possible. Certainly better than on a one core G4.
Give it up.
I think that some companies are going to have to look at a major upgrade in order to maximize their products. The service I sell was DOS based only for a long time - then it was necessary to look at Windows. It took a decision to make the investment and some thought was put into that decision. (No chance for a Mac based version - aghhhh!) I'm hoping that Adobe can take a 5 - 7 year approach in determining the viability of investing in the efforts to do a first rate job - I believe that investment would pay off over time.
The one app I am looking at more than anything else is VPC. MS has a chance to work some magic here in their MBU and I look forward to seeing what they do.
Originally posted by kenaustus
It's certainly going to be an interesting time for a lot of apps.
I think that some companies are going to have to look at a major upgrade in order to maximize their products. The service I sell was DOS based only for a long time - then it was necessary to look at Windows. It took a decision to make the investment and some thought was put into that decision. (No chance for a Mac based version - aghhhh!) I'm hoping that Adobe can take a 5 - 7 year approach in determining the viability of investing in the efforts to do a first rate job - I believe that investment would pay off over time.
The one app I am looking at more than anything else is VPC. MS has a chance to work some magic here in their MBU and I look forward to seeing what they do.
We don't even know if it will be necessary.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
Yeah. That's what I was thinking when teh Steve said it was real easy for Cocoa apps.
I was sat their thinking of all the apps I used and how the majority of the big ones are Carbon. All of Adobe's, all of Macromedia's, Microsoft Office and a fair chunk of Apple's even including iTunes.
I can't see me shifting till there are some faster intel processors than today's G5s AND we've got OSX 10.5 plus the above software native.
Just a question or two from a non-Mac programmer.
1) Doesn't XCode allow you to write/compile Carbon apps as well as Cocoa apps?
2) If above is 'yes', then shouldn't carbon apps in XCode be tranmorgified to intel binaries as easily as Cocoa apps?
3) Finally then, assuming 1 and 2 answers to 'yes', shouldn't the talk of Carbon apps being difficult to port really be changed to Carbon/CodeWarrior apps being difficult to port.
Oh, and I love how some people think all Adobe should have been doing all these years is just keep re-writing their code from scratch to go along with the latest programming environment. Sure, no problem. "Let's toss our code and rewrite for Cocoa. No one's going to care that certain parts that always worked before now don't, because once we tell them its Cocoa, they'll go nuts!"
Plus, converting a cross-platform app to cocoa is a lot harder when there's no 'Yellow-box' for windows, like Apple originally promised. Oh, and if you don't think cross-platform is important, just wait until those pre-press shops start yelling that the work they did on their mac doesn't look the same as it does on the windows version.
Oh, and I didn't read that like the guy was whining about how hard it was to convert. He was just stating a fact. Its not as easy as some of you "Hey, it'll just take a couple of weeks! This will be the easiest transition ever!" seem to think.
Originally posted by Louzer
Just a question or two from a non-Mac programmer.
1) Doesn't XCode allow you to write/compile Carbon apps as well as Cocoa apps?
2) If above is 'yes', then shouldn't carbon apps in XCode be tranmorgified to intel binaries as easily as Cocoa apps?
While xCode will compile both languages, this has absolutely nothing to do with converting between the two. Converting is completely manual and involves rewriting pretty much everything.
Keep in mind, cocoa was designed from the very start to be platform agnostic from a programmer's perspective. It was purposefully abstracted from hardware. Carbon is the exact opposite and heralds from a time when writing for a specific platform was seen as neccessary to eek out more performance.
I don't think adobe or apple is doing anything unusual here. Both are trying to preemptively set the public's expectations for how quickly and somoothly the transition will go. Both have been pretty tame in their public comments IMHO. Apple says it won't be that bad. Adobe says that apple is sugar coating things. I don't think either party holds a grudge against the other. We're just seeing run of the mill commentery.
As far as coding practices go, Adobe is held in higher regard than Quark. However, the photoshop code base is aging and the time is approaching when it will have to be majorly overhauled... or end up like Quark.
Originally posted by noirdesir
...
Since a lot of apps will run faster on a Pentium M than on a G3 (the G4 and G5s beat the Pentium (M) mostly in areas where Altivec is used), this 80% might have to scaled by a factor of let's say 1.5, meaning you end up with 120% performance (alas only for non-Altivec apps). For Altivec-heavy apps this 80% drops down to 10% perhaps, so you would get 15% performance.
i do love statistics . Did you know that 4 of 10
numbers are false because of false statistic sources?
Originally posted by Vox Barbara
i do love statistics . Did you know that 4 of 10
numbers are false because of false statistic sources?
This might be a universal slogan, certainly in my mother tongue it is common to say: "I only believe the statistic analysis I falsified myself."
Originally posted by noirdesir
Slight correction, this comparison would have to be scaled by the difference between a native app on a 2 GHz dual-core Pentium M and a native app on a 2 GHz G3.
If the app runs on a G3 as fast as on a G4 then Rosetta would deliver about 80% (I have heard different numbers, but it must be around that) of the performance on a Pentium M where a native app would run as fast as on the G3.
Since a lot of apps will run faster on a Pentium M than on a G3 (the G4 and G5s beat the Pentium (M) mostly in areas where Altivec is used), this 80% might have to scaled by a factor of let's say 1.5, meaning you end up with 120% performance (alas only for non-Altivec apps). For Altivec-heavy apps this 80% drops down to 10% perhaps, so you would get 15% performance.
Nonsense. A Pentium M beats a 7447a with no problem. The performance of the 7448 is maybe 10-15% better.
Everyone had better wake up here. Apple won't be using Dothans in its machines they will be using Yonah's. At 2.33GHz dual core 2MB L2 shared cache 533-800MHz bus. At most six months after that Merom.
Stop this silly comparison between to be shortly discontinued chips from Intel which Apple will never be using, and new chips from Freescale which aren't even out yet. and until we KNOW that the 7448 will be arriving at speeds over the announced maximum 1.8 GHZ, stop assuming that they will be at 2GHZ.
Originally posted by melgross
We don't even know if it will be necessary.
Of course VPC or a similar application will be necessary.
There's two ways that the Intel Macs could run Windows without it that both suck.
1) Dual booting. If you just after running games though, maybe not so bad.
2) Merom/Conroe is supposed to support virtualization so you could run Windows alongside MacOSX as you do now in VPC but without VPC.
Neither solution would allow integration with MacOSX, no HFS+ filesystem support, no clipboard support, no windowed support more than likely either. Virtualization would make VPC an awful lot easier to do but VPC does more than just run Windows in it's own little sandbox.
I only use VPC to run IE6 to check which bits of a website design break in it but other people like to cut and paste between windows apps and Mac apps running concurrently. That still has to work.
Originally posted by melgross
Nonsense. A Pentium M beats a 7447a with no problem. The performance of the 7448 is maybe 10-15% better.
But it doesn't at everything and in particular areas it's not a fraction slower but multiples slower. Those areas may not matter to you. That's from Photoshop to iTunes that I've been running where I've found those multiples, and those matter to me. Intel may have better integer performance but the M is poor at floating point and vector. Whilst most things feel snappy, every now and again you hit up against something that takes 3x as long. When you do, it feels inexplicably slow if you're working cross platform.
And then there's the G5 and desktop Pentiums anyway. If we're after speed, you don't run your stuff on a crappy laptop with slow CPUs, slow memory, slow FSB, slow drives, slow GPU and ropey little screens. Intel or PPC, no matter so your argument is beside the point. Laptops are great but you don't buy them as rendering engines. Adobe's target customers aren't doing their work on laptops for the most part.
Originally posted by melgross
Everyone had better wake up here. Apple won't be using Dothans in its machines they will be using Yonah's. At 2.33GHz dual core 2MB L2 shared cache 533-800MHz bus. At most six months after that Merom.
Those figures sound great don't they. But the bus is quad pumped, the pipelines are longer, the 2MB cache is a patch up job because the cache misses are so bad that keeping stuff in the cache just in case is the only way to get performance out of a register starved design. It's comparing Apples and Pears. The architectural differences don't translate like that in a simple spec sheet comparison. Merom, in 64bit compares more directly but Apple are only doing 32bit intel so far! Xcode generates old skool IA32 code.
Originally posted by melgross
Stop this silly comparison between to be shortly discontinued chips from Intel which Apple will never be using, and new chips from Freescale which aren't even out yet. and until we KNOW that the 7448 will be arriving at speeds over the announced maximum 1.8 GHZ, stop assuming that they will be at 2GHZ.
ok, that's laptops again and we don't know that Apple will be using dual Yonahs, singles, Meroms or whatever either and at what speeds. So speculating which of the unreleased chips Apple may or may not use or which would be faster is silly on both sides. But we do it anyway.
We also don't know what they'll be sticking in a PowerMac which is more important for Adobe users than laptop chips but it's got to beat a dual 2.7Ghz G5 if you're a Pro user. Yonahs won't get close to that. Neither will Merom. Just as you don't expect G4s to do it either. Conroe might or the workstation/server class chips Intel have in the roadmap for later. But we don't know yet.
However, until there's native apps, I don't think Rosetta running PPC Photoshop will be acceptable to Pros for more than just fiddling about. 70-80% of a G3 just doesn't cut it for media apps even if we're talking a theoretical dual 2.66Ghz G3. I wouldn't be surprised if a 2.0Ghz iMac running native PPC Photoshop wouldn't still beat Rosetta on a dual 2.66Ghz Intel (or whatever top speed they come out with). The difference between a G3 and G4 at the same speed was quite phenomenal at some apps. Power users are really going to miss Altivec in the Rosetta emulation so getting native apps out quick is going to be important to them or they'll be better off sticking with G5 PowerMacs even with Intel Macs twice as fast at integer apps.
Mixing native and emulated on the same Intel PowerMac is going to be fun too. Could you imagine switching from native Intel QuicktimePro doing a file conversion to importing it in to AfterEffects running G3 Rosetta emulation. It'll be like driving an F1 car onto marshmallow.
Interestingly, Adobe have already converted their UI frameworks to MacOS on Intel. And released them as open source.
http://opensource.adobe.com/
They did that back in July. So Bruce is saying one thing whilst his engineers are doing another which is usually the case IME of CEOs. Expect the same crappy cross platform non standard interface on MacOS Intel too though. Let's just hope their Eve2 framework maps better onto OSX than previously. CS2 at least looked nicer than previous attempts.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
But it doesn't at everything and in particular areas it's not a fraction slower but multiples slower. Those areas may not matter to you. That's from Photoshop to iTunes that I've been running where I've found those multiples, and those matter to me. Intel may have better integer performance but the M is poor at floating point and vector. Whilst most things feel snappy, every now and again you hit up against something that takes 3x as long. When you do, it feels inexplicably slow if you're working cross platform.
And then there's the G5 and desktop Pentiums anyway. If we're after speed, you don't run your stuff on a crappy laptop with slow CPUs, slow memory, slow FSB, slow drives, slow GPU and ropey little screens. Intel or PPC, no matter so your argument is beside the point. Laptops are great but you don't buy them as rendering engines. Adobe's target customers aren't doing their work on laptops for the most part.
Those figures sound great don't they. But the bus is quad pumped, the pipelines are longer, the 2MB cache is a patch up job because the cache misses are so bad that keeping stuff in the cache just in case is the only way to get performance out of a register starved design. It's comparing Apples and Pears. The architectural differences don't translate like that in a simple spec sheet comparison. Merom, in 64bit compares more directly but Apple are only doing 32bit intel so far! Xcode generates old skool IA32 code.
ok, that's laptops again and we don't know that Apple will be using dual Yonahs, singles, Meroms or whatever either and at what speeds. So speculating which of the unreleased chips Apple may or may not use or which would be faster is silly on both sides. But we do it anyway.
We also don't know what they'll be sticking in a PowerMac which is more important for Adobe users than laptop chips but it's got to beat a dual 2.7Ghz G5 if you're a Pro user. Yonahs won't get close to that. Neither will Merom. Just as you don't expect G4s to do it either. Conroe might or the workstation/server class chips Intel have in the roadmap for later. But we don't know yet.
However, until there's native apps, I don't think Rosetta running PPC Photoshop will be acceptable to Pros for more than just fiddling about. 70-80% of a G3 just doesn't cut it for media apps even if we're talking a theoretical dual 2.66Ghz G3. I wouldn't be surprised if a 2.0Ghz iMac running native PPC Photoshop wouldn't still beat Rosetta on a dual 2.66Ghz Intel (or whatever top speed they come out with). The difference between a G3 and G4 at the same speed was quite phenomenal at some apps. Power users are really going to miss Altivec in the Rosetta emulation so getting native apps out quick is going to be important to them or they'll be better off sticking with G5 PowerMacs even with Intel Macs twice as fast at integer apps.
Mixing native and emulated on the same Intel PowerMac is going to be fun too. Could you imagine switching from native Intel QuicktimePro doing a file conversion to importing it in to AfterEffects running G3 Rosetta emulation. It'll be like driving an F1 car onto marshmallow.
Interestingly, Adobe have already converted their UI frameworks to MacOS on Intel. And released them as open source.
http://opensource.adobe.com/
They did that back in July. So Bruce is saying one thing whilst his engineers are doing another which is usually the case IME of CEOs. Expect the same crappy cross platform non standard interface on MacOS Intel too though. Let's just hope their Eve2 framework maps better onto OSX than previously. CS2 at least looked nicer than previous attempts.
You really are overdoing this. There have been enough tests published to show that your statements about relative speed are wrong. I've used PS, since that's what you are useing here as an example, since it first came out. I've used it an average of perhaps four hours a day five, and sometimes six days a week. I've also been beta testing it since version 1.0.2. I've done this on both platforms, though I'm a Mac user, and bought Macs, for the most part, for my company for this purpose.
I, and others, have found that for the past several years, both Macs and PC's are about equal. In some areas the Mac is faster, in other, the PC. Neither platform can claim a win anymore. I don't know of any filter in which, and we WERE talking about the Powerbook when we started, the Mac can claim several hundred percent speed gain. Which ones are you talking about? I don't have a PC here, but I'm sure others can run a test on them if you mention it.
You misstate certain technical aspects. It doesn't matter if the bus is quad pumped, octuple pumped or not. It's still much faster. No one agrues that the G4 bus is very slow. Not even Apple. This is a known problem. Going from a 167MHZ bus to a 200MHZ bus will do almost nothing. The G4 has been known to be bus limited for years. If they moved to a 400MHZ but it would help. And what are you talking about pipelines for? What does that have to do with anything? The cache is fine. One of the deficiencies of the PPC cpu's is the small caches. With the slow bus a large cache has a disproportional affect on performance. With a fast bus the performance increase is less. But a big cache will still make a difference. The Xenons have large multi MB L2 and L3 caches. It adds up to 30% of the performance of the chips. Not because cache hits are poor.
We know that Apple will be using Yonahs and Meroms at the highest speeds. We also know that Applw will use whatever the competition is using. You're being coy here. We also know that they won't be using the Intel chips that you are using here in your comparison.
Yonah and Merom are mobile chips. Haven't you gotten that yet? You want to discuss workstation and server chips?
We know Intel's roadmap because they just showed it to everyone. You can bet your bipple that none of these companies are going to make the same mistake they made going to 90nm.
Sheesh. Where are you getting these numbers from? The G3 and G4 are exactly the same except for Altivec. What your are missing here is that the current Pentium M is as fast as a much faster P4 in most tasks. The Yonah and Meroms will be faster yet per clock, as well as having a higher clock. SSE3 will be much better than SSE2 and benefits from the faster clock as well.
Intels workstation chips will beat the pants off those.
All of this will wait for the actual machines. Until then we won't be able to do more than guess A good guess is that PS on a hi-end Mactel Powerbook will perform about as well as the latest PPC Powerbook at the time. Maybe a bit slower in some things maybe not.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
Of course VPC or a similar application will be necessary.
There's two ways that the Intel Macs could run Windows without it that both suck.
1) Dual booting. If you just after running games though, maybe not so bad.
2) Merom/Conroe is supposed to support virtualization so you could run Windows alongside MacOSX as you do now in VPC but without VPC.
Neither solution would allow integration with MacOSX, no HFS+ filesystem support, no clipboard support, no windowed support more than likely either. Virtualization would make VPC an awful lot easier to do but VPC does more than just run Windows in it's own little sandbox.
I only use VPC to run IE6 to check which bits of a website design break in it but other people like to cut and paste between windows apps and Mac apps running concurrently. That still has to work.
Necessary and preferred are two different things. If you want to run Win software and games, it might not be necessary. Possibly it will run native at full speed.
If, as you say, you want to cut and paste that would be different. You might also run WINE or Crossfire (I think that's the name).
Originally posted by melgross
You really are overdoing this. There have been enough tests published to show that your statements about relative speed are wrong.
But I'm sat here WITH an Acer Pentium M laptop that will only encode in iTunes at about 6x speed and a copy of Photoshop on it that will apply some filters to images about 2x slower than my 1.8Ghz G5. On average sized images for the web I can work almost in realtime on my Mac whereas moving a slider on the Acer makes me wait a few seconds.
A DVD transcode took about 3 hours on the G5 and 5 on the Acer using the same software - mencoder.
It's not a lemon of a laptop as it does well in tests. Not superfast but you pay a lot more for 2.xGhz Pentium Ms.
Both have a GB of ram. The Windows laptop actually feels faster than my G5 in use but Windows usually does.
So what gives here?
I'm not clueless here - crap, I was certified Windows developer from back as far as pre-release NT and I wouldn't touch a Mac till OSX because the OS was a joke. My shelf still has MSDN disks on it. But I'm really not seeing similar performance out of a Pentium M for some tasks. It's not a bad CPU, don't get me wrong, but it's missing media functionality in the same way the G3 Macs were.
And the Photoshop shootout on ArsTechnica bears some of this out too. Pentium M gets trounced...
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/grou...m/121008259631
So do G3 because they don't support AltiVec. Maybe Photoshop uses SSE3 on the desktop chips?
But anyway, this is off the topic. I really don't care about laptops! The issue is when Adobe are going to have native apps so that we're not running G3 emulations and when are we going to get machines that are faster than our current desktops. It's pointless 'upgrading' to an Intel Mac if Photoshop runs faster on a G5 or faster on Windows. I'd guess that when Adobe get a native Intel version out, Apple may have PowerMacs out that Pros may want to use instead of G5s.
Originally posted by melgross
You misstate certain technical aspects. It doesn't matter if the bus is quad pumped, octuple pumped or not. It's still much faster. No one agrues that the G4 bus is very slow. Not even Apple. This is a known problem. Going from a 167MHZ bus to a 200MHZ bus will do almost nothing. The G4 has been known to be bus limited for years. If they moved to a 400MHZ but it would help. And what are you talking about pipelines for? What does that have to do with anything? The cache is fine. One of the deficiencies of the PPC cpu's is the small caches. With the slow bus a large cache has a disproportional affect on performance. With a fast bus the performance increase is less. But a big cache will still make a difference. The Xenons have large multi MB L2 and L3 caches. It adds up to 30% of the performance of the chips. Not because cache hits are poor.
I won't disagree there at all, but large caches just aren't as important to the PPC as they are to Intel, especially the Pentium4, less so with the M, so you're comparing Apples and Pears again. And in any case, The G5 FSB is way, way faster than anything there which is why Pros use desktops lot laptops.
Originally posted by melgross
We know that Apple will be using Yonahs and Meroms at the highest speeds. We also know that Applw will use whatever the competition is using. You're being coy here. We also know that they won't be using the Intel chips that you are using here in your comparison.
We don't know anything here. The developer boxes use Pentium 4 and integrated graphics even. And again you're back on laptops? Repeat after me - Desktops for Pros, Laptops for people who don't put speed as No1 priority.
However, if Adobe don't get native software out in a timely fashion then comparing chips is going to be pointless as we'll be comparing software under emulation. There will be no reason to upgrade to a new Intel PowerMac unless it runs the software you need faster than today's G5. Windows will always run the adobe software faster till it's native and quite possibly afterwards too if Apple haven't got as good a compiler or Adobe/Apple have made a hash of it.
Originally posted by melgross
Yonah and Merom are mobile chips. Haven't you gotten that yet? You want to discuss workstation and server chips?
I know. But why do you keep going on about them? The article is about software, not laptops. I know we've been bitching about G5 laptops every Tuesday for years but there are other fruit you know.
Originally posted by melgross
We know Intel's roadmap because they just showed it to everyone. You can bet your bipple that none of these companies are going to make the same mistake they made going to 90nm.
So did Freescale. Your point is? Call me cynical but IBM, Freescale, Intel and AMD all miss their roadmaps.
Originally posted by melgross
Sheesh. Where are you getting these numbers from? The G3 and G4 are exactly the same except for Altivec.
Yes, and that makes all the difference for some tasks! I had a 500Mhz g3 and a 400Mhz G4 at the same time. The G4 was much quicker most of the time.
Originally posted by melgross
What your are missing here is that the current Pentium M is as fast as a much faster P4 in most tasks.
It's not. The 2.x Dothans are getting there but you've got to clock them past 2.5Ghz to approach the fastest P4 and Athlons. And they cost about the same too so there's no real advantage other than heat and noise.
Originally posted by melgross
The Yonah and Meroms will be faster yet per clock, as well as having a higher clock. SSE3 will be much better than SSE2 and benefits from the faster clock as well.
Intels workstation chips will beat the pants off those.
SSE3 really isn't that much better than SSE2 and neither are as good as AltiVec.
Intel's current workstation chips are also extremely expensive and get beaten by the PowerMac today.
Originally posted by melgross
All of this will wait for the actual machines. Until then we won't be able to do more than guess A good guess is that PS on a hi-end Mactel Powerbook will perform about as well as the latest PPC Powerbook at the time. Maybe a bit slower in some things maybe not.
Who the fudge cares about Powerbooks for Photoshop use? I just don't get it. If you're a Pro you want a fast desktop. If you need to be mobile, you live with slower computing and less resources. If you need speed and Adobe haven't graced us with a Mactel version then you're stuck with a fast G3 emulation or you boot into Windows
That's what I was getting at. Transition is only going to be smooth if you can get native versions of your main apps. 2007/08 is going to be that time when Intel PowerMacs are faster than G5s, there's native software and everyone's saved up enough cash to buy new versions of everything.
Originally posted by melgross
Nonsense. A Pentium M beats a 7447a with no problem.
I have not said f***g otherwise. I, out of my head, said that for non-Altivec tasks the Pentium M is 50% faster than a G4. That number is naturally quite arbitrary but it certainly fits your description that the 'Pentium M beats a 7447a with no problem'.
But nobody is talking about that comparison, since there won't be any Pentium M native version of Photoshop running on a Mac for about a year. You see, I don't care how fast Photoshop runs under Windows because using Windows is simply not an option for me.
I am talking about how Photoshop runs on G4s compared to what it would run under Rosetta on a Pentium M.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
If you need to be mobile, you live with slower computing and less resources. If you need speed and Adobe haven't graced us with a Mactel version then you're stuck with a fast G3 emulation or you boot into Windows
My computing life revolves around multitasking, I have currently 25 running apps in my Dock. Booting into Windows is the least thing I would do (waiting several minutes to boot back and forth and quit and restart all the programs and not being able to use other apps while you do this just to save a few seconds on an image manipulation? One would be crazy to do this.), using an Intel-native version of VirtualPC would be an option maybe however.
No, the only question for me is, should I get the last high-end G4 Powerbook, or should I wait for the Intel-Macs? And since I
a) Don't want to wait that long for an upgrade.
b) Just want to get a G4 despite of it
the last reason
c) Photoshop on an Intel-Mac might run even slower than on G4 troughout 2006
just confirms my decision.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
But I'm sat here WITH an Acer Pentium M laptop that will only encode in iTunes at about 6x speed and a copy of Photoshop on it that will apply some filters to images about 2x slower than my 1.8Ghz G5. On average sized images for the web I can work almost in realtime on my Mac whereas moving a slider on the Acer makes me wait a few seconds.
A DVD transcode took about 3 hours on the G5 and 5 on the Acer using the same software - mencoder.
It's not a lemon of a laptop as it does well in tests. Not superfast but you pay a lot more for 2.xGhz Pentium Ms.
Both have a GB of ram. The Windows laptop actually feels faster than my G5 in use but Windows usually does.
So what gives here?
I'm not clueless here - crap, I was certified Windows developer from back as far as pre-release NT and I wouldn't touch a Mac till OSX because the OS was a joke. My shelf still has MSDN disks on it. But I'm really not seeing similar performance out of a Pentium M for some tasks. It's not a bad CPU, don't get me wrong, but it's missing media functionality in the same way the G3 Macs were.
And the Photoshop shootout on ArsTechnica bears some of this out too. Pentium M gets trounced...
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/grou...m/121008259631
So do G3 because they don't support AltiVec. Maybe Photoshop uses SSE3 on the desktop chips?
But anyway, this is off the topic. I really don't care about laptops! The issue is when Adobe are going to have native apps so that we're not running G3 emulations and when are we going to get machines that are faster than our current desktops. It's pointless 'upgrading' to an Intel Mac if Photoshop runs faster on a G5 or faster on Windows. I'd guess that when Adobe get a native Intel version out, Apple may have PowerMacs out that Pros may want to use instead of G5s.
I won't disagree there at all, but large caches just aren't as important to the PPC as they are to Intel, especially the Pentium4, less so with the M, so you're comparing Apples and Pears again. And in any case, The G5 FSB is way, way faster than anything there which is why Pros use desktops lot laptops.
We don't know anything here. The developer boxes use Pentium 4 and integrated graphics even. And again you're back on laptops? Repeat after me - Desktops for Pros, Laptops for people who don't put speed as No1 priority.
However, if Adobe don't get native software out in a timely fashion then comparing chips is going to be pointless as we'll be comparing software under emulation. There will be no reason to upgrade to a new Intel PowerMac unless it runs the software you need faster than today's G5. Windows will always run the adobe software faster till it's native and quite possibly afterwards too if Apple haven't got as good a compiler or Adobe/Apple have made a hash of it.
I know. But why do you keep going on about them? The article is about software, not laptops. I know we've been bitching about G5 laptops every Tuesday for years but there are other fruit you know.
So did Freescale. Your point is? Call me cynical but IBM, Freescale, Intel and AMD all miss their roadmaps.
Yes, and that makes all the difference for some tasks! I had a 500Mhz g3 and a 400Mhz G4 at the same time. The G4 was much quicker most of the time.
It's not. The 2.x Dothans are getting there but you've got to clock them past 2.5Ghz to approach the fastest P4 and Athlons. And they cost about the same too so there's no real advantage other than heat and noise.
SSE3 really isn't that much better than SSE2 and neither are as good as AltiVec.
Intel's current workstation chips are also extremely expensive and get beaten by the PowerMac today.
Who the fudge cares about Powerbooks for Photoshop use? I just don't get it. If you're a Pro you want a fast desktop. If you need to be mobile, you live with slower computing and less resources. If you need speed and Adobe haven't graced us with a Mactel version then you're stuck with a fast G3 emulation or you boot into Windows
That's what I was getting at. Transition is only going to be smooth if you can get native versions of your main apps. 2007/08 is going to be that time when Intel PowerMacs are faster than G5s, there's native software and everyone's saved up enough cash to buy new versions of everything.
Despite your denials, this discussion was started with a comparison between PPC Powerbooks and Mactel Powerbooks (or whatever they will be called).
It was between G4's and whatever Apple would be using instead. Rosetta performance being based on that. From the last line of the report:
"It has been reported that Apple holds one final PowerPC-based PowerBook G4 update that should debut this fall."
We aren't talking about G5's, except in the unlikely chance that Apple will use them for this last PB update. We are talking about Powerbook performance.
You may not want to talk about it. That's fine. Then limit your discussion to something else. As I said, if you want to talk about workstations, fine . But don't mix the chipsets, and compare the M Dothan to the Dual G5's. No one else is doing so.
Also, you may not keep with things, but more work is being done on PB's all the time. I know quite a few pro's from my own dealings through my company who do most of their PS work on a portable.
If you have such performance differences, I suggest that you have problems of your own with your equipment.
Again, it's a poor comparison to compare a laptop with a tower. Compare your 1.8GHz G5 with the same price PC tower and come back here. You will be rather disappointed.
There is no point in discussing this any further until you understand what the discussion is about, and can make the proper comparisons.
Laptop use by pro's is a VERY common thing. Both for PS and video editing. Maybe you're not a full time pro and so don't have to work under the same conditions. But I can tell you that many pro's work on location with laptops. More all the time. You're dismissing that is something I can't understand.
With digital having almost completely taken over the professional market in catalog, fashion, and studio product photography, laptops are becoming ever more important.