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Apple Responds to Adobe
Thargok333 writes "Apple calls out Adobe on the 'PC is Faster' article linked from the Adobe website. They state that it is an After Effects bug, which they are working close to Adobe to fix. With Adobe's idea of G4 optimization, I am not impressed that a 'single 1.25 GHz G3' gets beat by a P4 3 GHz."
I've heard that a good amount of the base code in their products is in Pascal. While I don't know if this is true, it would also imply a helluva lot of 68k code still lurking about in their software. Going through both 68k emulation as well as another compatibility API is just bad. I hope this is not the case.
Mac developers have had almost 10 years to get rid of the 68K code. Fat apps existed for a while, but I would be beyond shocked to find out there was a single 'mov' of 68K code in any Adobe product. It's not like they employ a bunch of lazy programmers -- they have a very talented lot.
Why not put some thought into making performance better rather than making gee-whiz features that most folks never asked for.
Again, I would doubt this is the case here. At a lesser development organisation, maybe, but not Adobe. Especially given that they are right up the street (so to speak) from Apple, they've got all the opportunity in the world to get help optimizing their products. And most of the gee-whiz features you find in a shrink-wrap program come about because more than a handful of customers asked for them. Sure, developers always find neat little things to do, but Usenet and other forums are far from short on ideas from everyday users. You may not use a cutesy feature, but plenty of other people will.
And that Apple has been able to tweak MUCH better performance and features out of products like the Final Cut series shows that it CAN be done.
The catch here is that Apple has one platform to target. They could write the whole of the app in PPC assembly and no one would care. Adobe has to maintain a code base that stretches across 2 platforms, and they have to weigh the cost of maintaining divergent sources with the benefit gained by increasing platform-specific code. It's not an easy trade, but in the end, they will probably have more shared code that is not 100% optimized for this reason.
Also, we don't know what Adode's Mac revenue stream looks like these days. You would think that they get a ton of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. sales from the Mac side, but I see more and more Windows boxes on the desks of artists and designers. Again, this is a cost-benefit situation that Adobe must analyze, and maybe they don't see the need to pour hundreds or thousands on man-hours into optimizing tiny bits of their Mac code for a few more sales.
On the other hand, maybe Adobe realizes they need to tighten up the PPC/Mac code, but they are running short on resources for that. So they post a benchmark on their site saying Windows kicks Apple's ass. Apple panicks and says, "Not so!" The next day, 2 of Apple's crack engineers drive over to Adobe and help them optimize code for a week, writing a bunch of PPC stuff that Adobe didn't have time for. Voila! They get some free (or cheaper) help and Apple looks like the hero. Marketing bullshit at it's finest.
Off the top of my head I can think of the shorter pipeline and AltiVec. But, should the G4 have an "edge"? Who really cares?
Years ago, the Mac platform had the edge in performance and clock speed thanks to Power Computing's "Power Tower Pro 200". At that time nobody was whining that Windows has to switch to PPC in order to remain viable.
The "honest answer", the most relevant thing I can add to this, is that the PPC architecture and the Pentium architecture tend to leapfrog each other every few years, and right now it looks like PPC is losing by a small margin.
I'm not holding my breath, but IBM's 970 and other iterations of the "Power 4" line may well tip the scales slightly in the other direction. For a little while, at least.
Before Steve Jobs re-joined Apple he was interviewed in Rolling Stone (I think, or maybe it was Spin), and when asked how he felt about Apple's move to PowerPC architecture his response was that he was happy for Apple, because now they've got a Pentium of their own. Of course he was with NeXT at the time, but the point is that Apple, Motorola and Intel really don't care that much who is making faster machines, as long as they're marketable as being as fast as they can be.
Battling over processor speed is just what Intel/AMD/Motorola/IBM would like us to be doing, because of the few of us who are really qualified to say which architecture is faster, an even smaller percentage of those people realize just how moot the point is.
A slight Wintel performance edge is not going to have thousands of Mac users rushing over to the other side. And it isn't performance that makes Windows users switch to Mac.
I can only speak to multimedia content generation. I have never measured the speed of my PowerMac dual 1GHz with Final Cut Pro against a 3GHz Pentium running Premiere, but I do know that after 3 years of using Adobe's products with third-party hardware and drivers on Windows, I gave up and got a Mac with Apple software.
I bought 4 boxes: PowerMac, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, and a 6-to-4 pin firewire cable for camera. I have never purchased another accessory, peripheral, or software package, and the system is so well designed and executed that I can start an editing session in the morning and mail a 1 hour tape or DVD to a client by 5.
With the Powerbook, I can shoot video and edit it on the plane home. If it's a long plane ride, I'll have the DVD burned before we land, while the guy in the seat next to me fights with his Vaio or Dell (I've been on many flights where some poor bastard gets no work done because Windows eats itself; it's happened to me too).
My experiences over the past 5 years convince me that the Megahertz mongers have got the issues backwards. If you can first show me any combination of PC and laptop hardware on the Intel platform that can do everything I describe above for the exact same price, I will look at the speed of filter application or transition rendering.
My point is that if Apple makes faster machines their superior systems will be better than they are now. If speed is the only improvement a PC with Windows and Adobe products offers, that system is still inferior to the Mac.