Speaking of the future, here’s a glimpse of future 64-bit Adobe video products taking much greater advantage of GPUs:
Presenter Dave Helmly writes:

In the video you’ll see incredible AVCHD playback and scrubbing, working with DSLR cameras like the Canon 5D & 7D, 9 Layers of P2, Native Red 4K Multicam editing and RED keying and lastly, you see accelerated rendering for exports.

Check out this post from last week for more info.

This morning Simon Hayhurst from Adobe’s video group announced that the next versions of Adobe After Effects & Premiere Pro will be 64-bit native & will require a 64-bit system to run (meaning a 64-bit processor and operating system). See Simon’s post, as well as this one from AE PM Michael Coleman, for more details.

If you’re running these apps today on a Mac, you’re probably already set (as CS4 is Intel-only). The only 32-bit Intel Macs were the first-gen MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac minis. On the Windows side, chances are again good that you’re running on a 64-bit processor, but you’ll want to make sure to move to a 64-bit version of Vista or Windows 7 if you haven’t done so already.

Does this news mean that the next version of Photoshop will carry the same requirements? No. Photoshop.next will still support 32-bit operating systems and processors (alongside 64-bit ones). It’ll be nice to go 64-bit-only someday (just so that we can focus all our development and testing time on this setup), but Photoshop’s user base is diverse, and the time isn’t quite right. In the meantime, supporting both flavors doesn’t compromise Photoshop.

Additional resources:

• The Production Premium Suite FAQ
• White papers demonstrating 64-bit advantages in CS4
• A post from DV evangelist Dennis Radeke
• All 64-bit-related posts on this blog

John Gruber has posted a thorough, thoughtful piece on iTunes, Cocoa, and 64-bit software. He makes a number of useful, sensible points about how Cocoa is “not magic pixie dust” but does open the door to UI & performance improvements. (Lest anyone forget, the Photoshop team has been working for quite a while to move Photoshop to Cocoa and 64-bit.) It’s well worth a read.

A few thoughts:

• Getting functionality for free (e.g. when a standard Cocoa control is improved) sounds great, but it’s something a developer like Adobe has to consider carefully:
  • Whether or not it’s important to you, cross-platform consistency matters a great deal to many customers (e.g. those in a large company that runs Macs & Windows machines). It’s hard to expose one’s apps to those sorts of changes. (As I’ve written, consistency within an OS & consistency across OSes both matter.)
  • I know Adobe apps sometimes catch flak for using custom UI widgets, but you don’t want the apps limited (or made inconsistent) by what the different OSes provide. If customers benefit from something like scrubby sliders, and if you want the experience to be consistent, you need to provide them yourself.
• Gruber writes, “Maybe the Carbon APIs will never go away, but I wouldn’t bet on that.” I don’t know what Apple plans; I just ask (as I’ve asked them previously) that they communicate plans in advance. If they want to say, “Listen, four years from now, Carbon-based & 32-bit apps aren’t going to work anymore, period; you can transition everything now, you can wait ’til the last second, or you can spread it out,” that’s fine. (It’s enormously helpful in planning, actually.) Just provide plenty of lead time so that no one–Mac users, developers, or Apple–gets squeezed.

Prior to today’s Apple announcements, John Gruber wondered aloud on Daring Fireball:

What I’m interested in is more esoteric: is the Mac version [of iTunes] still a 32-bit Carbon app? Common sense says yes, but that’s because common sense says it’s never a good time for a low-level framework rewrite. But the writing is on the wall: the future is 64-bit, and the only path to 64-bit is Cocoa, so eventually, it has to happen.

Let me be really clear: I think Cocoa is great. I think 64-bit is great. (We’re embracing both with Photoshop.) But I’m really, genuinely curious: What specifically do people believe a transition to either is going to add to their software? In the case of iTunes, I have to ask:

• Do people really have performance problems* with iTunes as it is?
  • I never have. It filters my 3,000-item library as fast as I can type, does a lovely job with HD video, and whips through album art in Cover Flow. I can’t recall others complaining, either.
• Do they want iTunes to use more than 4GB of RAM?
  • I think we can safely say “No.”
• Do they complain about the UI (e.g. non-standard scrollbars) and think that Cocoa will make iTunes more “Mac-like”?
  • Again, I haven’t heard complaints (or rather, only ridiculous ones).

So what, then? Let me put it another way: If you were directing the iTunes team’s efforts, why would you–as a customer–tell them to spend their time on Cocoa and/or 64-bit, at the expense of doing other things customers want?

I don’t know why I feel compelled to scratch this itch. See, a smarter, lazier, and/or more cynical product manager than I would simply kick back, shut up, and say, “Photoshop CS-X is 64-bit and based on Cocoa, so you should buy it!” If anyone dared ask how these facts might benefit her, I’d just loudly repeat, “But it’s COCOA! and 64-BIT! So that’s, like, AUTOMATICALLY AWESOME!”

For better or worse, that’s not how I roll. I want people to buy my (and our) work based on real value, not due to lack of information. I suppose I can take some weird solace in the fact that no matter what I say, many people will go on happily believing whatever they want.

So, out of honest curiosity I ask: If you’re pining for iTunes 64, why (specifically)?

*Not, of course, that 64-bit is any kind of panacea.

When reading about the advantages of 64-bit computing, you’ll sometimes hear that 64-bit chips offer more processor registers, and that using these registers will make apps faster. As I wrote last year when revealing Adobe’s 64-plans for Photoshop, PS does see a slight performance gain in 64-bit mode:

In our testing, when the app isn’t using a large data set (one that would otherwise require memory swapping), the speedup due to running in 64-bit mode is around 8-12%.

I asked some of the senior Photoshop engineers for background on why the impact of extra registers is pretty low.

“Most of the code we’ve identified as performance bottlenecks was long ago optimized, and in some cases hand-optimized,” replied Jon Clauson. “Such code really doesn’t get any faster because the processor/compiler has more registers to play with. We were happy we saw a general 8-12%.” He also noted that in many cases, Photoshop is not processor-bound, but rather memory bandwidth-bound.

Photoshop architect Russell Williams offered a bit longer answer:

Much of the performance-critical code is tuned not just for few general-purpose registers, but to use SSE, and those registers don’t change size with the move to 64 bits: SSE registers are still 128 bits.

The speedup on compiled C code when going from 32 to 64 bits on Intel varies widely depending on how much the compiler needs those extra registers and how much of the cache is taken up by pointers and bigger ints. Even when it looks like you ought to be getting a bigger win because of the extra registers, the win is less than you’d think because of the heavy hardware and compiler emphasis put on optimizing the loads and stores generated by temporary register spillage. (They’ve been trying to minimize the impact of that limited register set for a long time.)

Russell also pointed out some ExtremeTech benchmarks showing a mixed bag for running real-world apps in 32- vs. 64-bit mode.

Again, to be clear, none of this means that 64-bit isn’t great. It is. It’s just not some magic can of go-fast juice.

[Note: All my 64-bit-related posts, including coverage of third-party Photoshop plug-ins ported to 64-bit so far, are in this blog’s 64-bit category.]

To the less technically-knowledgeable folks out there: Please stop asking for a 64-bit version of iTunes or DVD Player or Fireworks or whatever, blindly assuming that “number of bits” equals “goodness.” This is, of course, all coming up as Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard release is due shortly. Let’s refer to Apple’s developer documentation on the subject:

From Apple’s MacOS X Technology Overview:

For many developers, however, compiling their code into 64-bit programs may not offer any inherent advantages. Unless your program needs more than 4 GB of addressable memory, supporting 64-bit pointers may only reduce the performance of your application.

Not convinced? Let’s try Apple’s 64-bit Transition Guide, “Common Misconceptions”:

Myth: My application will run much faster if it is a “native” 64-bit application.

Fact: Some 64-bit executables may run more slowly on 64-bit Intel architectures because of increased cache pressure.

On Intel-based Macintosh computers, you may see some performance improvement. The number of registers and the width of registers increases in 64-bit mode. Because of the increased number of registers, function call parameters can be passed in registers instead of on the stack. The increased register width makes certain performance optimizations possible in 64-bit mode that are not possible in 32-bit mode. These improvements will often (but not always) offset the performance impact caused by increased cache pressure.

It bums me out that I’ll be seen as “The 64-Bit Wet Blanket Guy,” especially when Adobe has been way out ahead of the pack on the Mac*, shipping the 64-bit-native Lightroom 2 for more than a year. I think 64-bit is great, and it can yield huge performance gains in Photoshop–sometimes 10x or more—when you’re using huge files that demand very large amounts of RAM (4+ GB). But I’m not willing to blow a bunch of smoke on the subject, nor do I like seeing developers–Apple, Adobe, or otherwise–get browbeaten due to ignorance.

By the way, someone will pop up momentarily to talk about how having access to more processor registers makes apps faster. That’s true in some cases (e.g. Apple touts that you can open PDFs 20% faster in 64-bit mode), but it’s not a big win for a highly tuned application like Photoshop. I’ve supplied more details about that in a separate post.

* Up until now (the release of Snow Leopard), who else is even shipping 64-bit Mac apps? My searches have turned up almost nothing.

The roadmap for Adobe apps becoming 64-bit-native is a bit complicated, with some (Lightroom on Mac & Windows, Photoshop on Windows) being there now, some (Premiere Pro, After Effects) largely there now, and some yet to come. To provide an overview & to outline some performance benefits, the company has created a white paper (PDF) on the subject. [Via Anita Engelman]
Update: In response to a question in the comments, After Effects PM Michael Coleman has added some more details:

Jerry raises a good question: Can a 32-bit app be architected to take advantage of 64-bit OS?
Absolutely!
Prior to multi-core rendering, all rendering took place within the bounds of a 32-bit memory space. Today, parallel processing is the key. If After Effects weren’t architected to take advantage of 64-bit, all your processor cores would be using the same small chunk of RAM. Instead, multi-core rendering on a 64-bit OS can use up to 4GB per core. After Effects has been rendering faster because of this architecture since CS3 shipped back in 2007. And it’s been improved in CS4.
What about optimizations? Let’s say you only have 2GB of RAM. You might assume that you’re not a candidate for some of the improvements offered by using CS4 with a 64-bit OS. But this isn’t the case. After Effects uses RAM intensively, and it can do so more efficiently and reliably on a 64-bit OS.
In some respects, After Effects is a hybrid – a little bit like a Toyota Prius. Is it practical to be completely electric? Not yet. Does that mean that we should give up spectacular gas mileage and clean-burning technology now? No way. These are great advances and you don’t have to wait around for the Chevy Volt. Like CS4, the Prius is improving the world now. You’ll have to wait until 2010 for that Volt.
All things considered, CS4 and a 64-bit OS are probably one of the best investments you can make in 2009.

…get lots of RAM, and if you use Windows, move to Vista 64 or Windows 7 64*.
You’ll be glad you did, as both After Effects and Premiere can address 4GB of RAM *per processor core*. That means that on an 8-core Mac Pro or Vista 64 rig, you could devote up to 32 gigs of RAM just to AE or Premiere.
Will all that memory benefit your projects? Depends on how big they are. Writer Jan Ozer produced some pretty amazing results with big jobs, in one case cutting rendering time from 68 minutes to ~10. Adobe DV evangelist Dennis Radeke has more info on the subject.
* Re: XP64, to quote the spinners in Blade Runner, “Move on, move on…”

To help plug-in developers make better decisions about when to create 64-bit versions of their products, I’d like to gather a little info about what operating system(s) you use to run Photoshop.  If you’re using Photoshop CS4, please take a second to answer this simple three-question survey.  (I’m asking specifically about CS4 customers as the 32-vs.-64-bit OS question doesn’t matter for CS3 or earlier.)  Once I get a sufficient number of responses, I’ll share the findings here.

Thanks,

J.

Er, aren’t they?  What’s the real story?

ZDNet’s George Ou suggests that the Photoshop team is deficient in not making Photoshop CS3 a 64-bit app:

x64 allows high performance computing tasks to run extremely fast and efficiently. The free Paint.NET image editing application, for example, is fully optimized for multi-core and x64, yet Adobe can’t get its act together and won’t even release an x64 edition of the upcoming Photoshop CS3… It’s just a crying shame for Adobe to lag behind, because Paint.NET has shown tremendous speed increases using x64 for filtering and layering effects on the order of 50 to 100 percent speed boosts. Adobe should have been supporting x64 two years ago and it won’t even do it next year.

Meanwhile, Paint.NET developer Rick Brewster commented on Photoshop architect Scott Byer’s post "Photoshop: 64 bits… when?", saying that they got speedups in certain routines, but still aren’t matching Photoshop’s
speed:

Yup the reason Gaussian Blur shows such a big win in Paint.NET is due
to its use of 64-bit math. Photoshop seems to have some secret sauce
that enables its implementation to be much faster regardless, so props
on that.

Ahem.

I’m not saying that 64-bit computing doesn’t offer some advantages; it does.  I am saying (and have been saying) that the story is a tad more complicated than "Adobe can’t get its act together."  I don’t like the idea that we’ll have to pursue a certain path and accept the consequences (breaking plug-ins, eating more RAM, etc.) just because it would look good on a spec sheet.  We’ll do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because it’s buzzword-compliant. [Via]