[G4] G5 and photoshop

[Mel]

As I recall, Mr. Jobs said the same thing about Carbonizing when he 
introduced OS X and had an Adobe guy up on the stage saying that 
Photoshop was 95% done. How long did it take Adobe to deliver a 100% 
Carbonized Photoshop? I'm not saying that some programs will not be 
simple to do. But the OS, and many other programs are not trivial. 
Changing from 32 to 64 bit registers can require significant 
architectural changes. If you don't require the precision of 64 bit 
registers, or need an address space larger than 2GB (!) there's not 
even any point in making the effort. When you go in to make changes to 
a program, you might recompile as 64 bit if there are no architectural 
changes required, but since there is not penalty in the hardware or OS 
for running in 32 bit mode, you would not have to.
Mr. Jobs obviously wants to make it all sound very simple, and for some 
(maybe even most) programs it will be, but in engineering, things are 
rarely as simple as a good marketer will make them sound.
Mel

On Saturday, August 9, 2003, at 11:41  AM, Kunga wrote:

> Mr. Jobs and a developer demonstrated porting 32-bit applications to 
> 64-bit in a matter of minutes during his historic June 23rd SteveNote. 
> It is from that presentation that I derived the idea that it is easy 
> and quick to port applications to 64-bitness. Is that not what he told 
> us? If you can't remember that part of the address, I will be happy to 
> look it up and quote what was said. I have the whole thing on my hard 
> drive.
>
> kunga10 (AIM)
> kunga47 (Yahoo Messenger with Cross-Platform dial-up Video sans audio 
> on Macs)
>
> On Friday, August 8, 2003, at 08:09  PM, Mel wrote:
>
>> As a project manager for software development, I must disagree with 
>> your characterization of migrating applications from 32 to 64 bits. 
>> I'm afraid that is nothing like trivial, and for many applications 
>> would not even be useful. As you pointed out, the higher bus speed 
>> and the greater memory throughput will generate breathtaking 
>> improvements that have been long overdue. The OS will take its time 
>> migrating from 32 to 64 bits, just as it took its time migrating from 
>> 680x0 to PPC native. Applications will do the same. The OS doesn't 
>> need to be fully 64 bit to take advantage of some of the features of 
>> the chip right away.
>> It would be great if Photoshop would be 64 bits by the time the G5s 
>> delivered, but the OS won't even be fully 64 bit. The most immediate 
>> need is to make memory addressing see more RAM, and as I understand 
>> 10.2.7, which will be the OS on the new G5s, has implemented that 
>> feature.
>> Just my two cents,
>> Mel
>