March 28th, 2007
Adobe 'no64' Photoshop CS3 launches
Yesterday saw the launch of Adobe "no64" CS3 with no AMD or Intel x64 64-bit extensions support. So what really prompted me to write this blog? Simple: It was Adobe's cavalier attitude that you'll get 64-bit support when Adobe says it's time. I found that link via Adobe blogger John Nack's post insinuating that I though 64-bit was "magic," which was written in response to my blog "Choosing between Vista x86 32 bit or x64 64 bit." Maybe I'm overreacting, but at no time did I ever suggest that there was anything magical about 64-bit computing, nor did I exaggerate the advantages of 64-bit computing.
I'll quickly recap the advantages x64 64-bit computing, all of which would benefit a resource-intensive application like Adobe CS3 immensely:
- Beyond 4-GB RAM support, which is important for a graphics application dealing with large and many bitmap images.
- Double-wide 64-bit CPU registers, which allow larger number calculations to be performed in fewer CPU cycles.
- Double the number of registers, which can even benefit 32-bit applications because more operations can be handled at the same time without going to slower CPU Cache or RAM.
Why is Adobe is so quick to discount the need for an x64 version of CS3? Is the need to avoid 64-bit binaries in parallel with 32-bit binaries more important than producing a better product? Adobe insists that few people are running x64 operating systems. But isn't that because companies like Adobe refuse to take the next logical evolutionary step in computing? It seems to me that there could potentially be more Windows XP x64 or Vista x64 users than there are all of Mac users combined if Adobe ever offered an x64 64-bit version of CS3 for Windows — yet Adobe is happy to create a Mac version of CS3.
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George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
