Living Photoshop: Macintosh and the Intel switch.
Macintosh and the Intel switch.By now you have probably figured out that we aren’t releasing Universal Binaries of our current application versions. If you haven’t, all you need to know is pretty explicitly spelled out here.
“But, c’mon”, I hear people saying, “Steve said it was just a recompile!” Or, “Back during the PowerPC transition, you guys released a patch!”
Well, this time is different. And I really wish it weren’t. But let me tell you how…
When that original PowerPC transition was done, Apple did something clever. Very clever. The emulator that ran 68k code would recognize when it was calling out to PPC code, and would fiddle with things on the stack using the Universal Procedure calling vector. A lot of gobbledy gook meaning that a 68k binary could call out to PPC code that could then execute at native speeds. Well, for those that don’t know, Photoshop has a bunch of routines all tucked away to do the real heavy lifting – the bottlenecks. Most of Photoshop’s CPU time is spent in these routines. Even better, you can replace these routines using a plug-in. There’s the Multiprocessor extension plug-in, which replaces some routines with ones that know how to divide work up among multiple processors. And some which use the multimedia instruction sets that are available to varying degrees on different processors. And, in the case of the PPC transition, we could replace them with PPC native versions. With a plug-in, Photoshop could get a majority of the speed up as if it were a fully native application, but – and it’s a key point here – without having to recompile the vast majority of the Photoshop code, along with the resulting testing hit, mounds of debugging, and everything else that would imply. Most of the gain with a fraction of the cost, it made sense to do a mid-cycle update consisting, essentially, of that plug-in.
Well it looks like it’ll be a bit before Intel Compatible Binaries will be released of the Adobe Suite. As a creatie professional I wonder how much this will hurt Apples plans on selling new Intel Macs. Mind they started with the commodity machines first with the roll out. The Consumer machines per say, but the major money is in the all the design firms and schools that use Adobe products and who will be wanting to upgrade.
Gee, Adobe can’t get with the program. Again. Imagine that. Those people are living in the dark ages. Apple is correct, it just takes a recompile IF you are using Apple’s dev tools and Cocoa. Unfortunately Adobe is still using CodeWarrior and Carbon libs. They have no clue over there. Yes, 95% of what they need to do is just make an Xcode project and import the source code, but it’ll be a long time before they figure that out. No doubt they will continue to fight the new way and try to find some kloodge to let them keep using 3rd party development tools.