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10 years ago today, Apple flipped the bird to PowerPC
- Thread starter Gamer9430
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I learned many years ago, that when you jump into the Apple world, you learn to expect and accept that they will change their mind at the first inkling of "something better" (at least in their minds). It's like raising kids- you pick your battles, sigh, and get on with it
It was both: there was never going to be a G6. Motorola/Freescale wasn't interested in developing a new desktop chip. All of the money in PPC chips (then and now) is in the embedded market, which needs small size, low heat and low power. After the collapse of the PReP/CHRP, and their promises of millions and millions of additional sales, Motorola/Freescale simply followed the money.
IBM basically created the G5 as a favor for Apple. They took a POWER4, lopped off most of the cache, bolted in AltiVec and delivered them. But IBM had no interest in making a viable G6, much less one which could fit into a laptop, which is why Apple had to resort to overclocking and water cooling for the last generation of G5s. At the time of the transition, Apple was selling about a million Macs a year. IBM would never have made its investment back, and it knew it. Apple had no choice but to go Intel or AMD, and history has shown that Intel was the right choice.
As an aside, I booted up my old dual 2GHz G5 the other day and watched both processors spike near 100% just rendering a modern web page. As much as I love the thing, as shown by the fact I still have it after all these years, a modern Mac Mini will run rings around it.
I don't think that is as much a limitation of the processor (but it does play a part) as much as it is the pure crap that most web pages have anymore. We're still in "OH MY GOD, EVERYTHING MUST BE SHINY AND TAX THE SYSTEM" mode on the web. It'll take a while before we get our Wizard of Oz or Gone With the Wind moments in webpages.
The moment that happens, expect something good.
I don't think that is as much a limitation of the processor (but it does play a part) as much as it is the pure crap that most web pages have anymore. We're still in "OH MY GOD, EVERYTHING MUST BE SHINY AND TAX THE SYSTEM" mode on the web. It'll take a while before we get our Wizard of Oz or Gone With the Wind moments in webpages.
The moment that happens, expect something good.
You can call it pure crap all you like, but it's the way the technology is heading. We're never going backwards.
Web pages are easy. I'd hate to open a 2 GB .psb file on the thing.
I'd be prepared to give it a try....
Aside from waiting five minutes, you're going to run out of RAM almost immediately. 16 GB is pretty much the floor for serious Photoshop work.
I love my G5. I've kept it around for years despite having no use for it. But I'm not going to kid myself and say it has anything near the performance of modern machines. An i7 Mac Mini will run rings around it.
It was tongue-in-cheek. Photoshop would be limited to 3GB of RAM anyway...
My 2009 Mini would run rings around the G5, despite being smaller than it's optical drive!
My 2009 Mini would run rings around the G5, despite being smaller than it's optical drive!
It was tongue-in-cheek. Photoshop would be limited to 3GB of RAM anyway...
My 2009 Mini would run rings around the G5, despite being smaller than it's optical drive!
I really do wish there was a reason to use her.
Agreed. Apparently I've never done any serious photoshop work. Maybe 16GB for After Effects..
So, tell me-how does one use more than 3gb of RAM in Photoshop CS4?
BTW, I have some 4x5 drum scans dating back to the mid-2000s that are close to 2gb in size, and my G5 can handle them in CS4 with zero issues. Much of the drum scanning hardware out there these days is getting very long in the tooth and is still being operated by turn-of-the-century Macintosh or Windows machines for compatibility reasons. A drum scanner can pretty much output any file size you want, and these older machines are still handling the workload just as they always have.
It's still crap. We're still in the "Fred Ott's Sneeze" stage when it comes to webpages.
Curious Post Script--I did agree with you on the processor playing a part. You going on the attack afterward is only making me side against you.
You never continue attacking when someone admits common ground.In all honesty, there is nothing my 2011 core i5 mini cannot do better than my dual 2.0 GHz G5 (well, aside from running PowerPC apps, lol). My G5 is there just to run PowerPC stuff and that's it. All of my G4's and G3's have been downgraded to OS 9-only machines for the same reasons--it's the snappiest OS they can run. Plus, I get to run those REALLY old apps I still have, because I am a hoarder.
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Interesting Photoshop benchmark test here:
http://ksimonian.com/Blog/2010/02/2...for-both-mac-pc-free-radial-blur-filter-test/
My Quad completes in 74.7 seconds...beating amongst others a 2010 i7 Macbook Pro. Forget the internet - this is where PowerPC can still compete. Oh and that's with 'only' 7Gb RAM...I'll run the test again when my Quadro FX4500 arrives, though I suspect it won't add much to the number crunching.
Considering I routinely work on multi-GB .psb files, no. Photoshop with less than 16GB is useless for me, unless I'm doing some small personal project.
I understand the necessity for more RAM when you're processing huge files but I don't think the criterion to measure whether work is professional or amateur is the file size
18.2 seconds on a 3.33 GHZ, 6-core 2010 Mac Pro, with a lot of stuff running in the background.
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I understand the necessity for more RAM when you're processing huge files but I don't think the criterion to measure whether work is professional or amateur is the file size
I didn't mean to cause offense: I was in a hurry. In my world, which includes print, and lots of huge files, 16 GB is pretty much the floor simply because of the way Photoshop manages memory. As I said, it's not uncommon to have to work on multi-GB images. Our retouchers have 32 GB of memory in their machines, and can sometimes use more than that. Obviously, if you're using Photoshop primarily for web development, you can get by with less.
I used to run drum scanners. Digital photography pretty much killed them off.
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Curious Post Script--I did agree with you on the processor playing a part. You going on the attack afterward is only making me side against you.
Didn't mean for that to come across as an attack. I was in a hurry, and sometimes context can get lost on the internet.
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I fotgot that CS4 can be 32-bit. It's been years since I used it.
As I said above, I used to run drum scanners. But, since the maturation of digital photography, they're few and far in between.
No offense taken - I understand your point now I know you work in that field. I used to work in print too - however, the only time I'd process multi Gb files was when doing exhibition graphics - I'd edit the Photoshop file at a manageable size, then resample it at distilling stage when it moves through Indesign to PDF.
I work on a lot of exhibition stuff; trade show booths and the like. Fortunately most of them only need to be 100dpi @100%, but for a big booth, that adds up quickly.
But even smaller print stuff can get huge. We have some full bleed 11x17 ads which have multiple composited images over a background. The native files for those are huge as well. Obviously we release flattened files, except when the client requests the layered files. . .
As far as I know, all versions of CS4 are 32 bit. Even on my Quad-a fully 64 bit computer-with 10gb of RAM CS4(and earlier) will still only let me allocate 3gb.
I have scratch disks on both of the hard drives which are, of course, slower than RAM but do speed things up by giving Photoshop its own designated partition to play with. I think that I have the scratch disks at about 10gb each and toward the front of the drive.
There a reason you've stuck with CS4? Any time Photoshop can't fit the entire image in RAM it will slow down to a crawl as it pages in and out.
On a G5, yes I'm at CS4 because that's the newest I can run.
In actuality, though, I use Lightroom 6 on my MBP 99% of the time, as it's faster for photographs while doing most of what Photoshop can do(and in an easier to use format). I do have Photoshop CS6 for the times I need Photoshop.
LR6 and CS6 are where the road ends with me on Adobe products for the forseeable future, as I won't buy into Creative Cloud. Fortunately at least I was able to still buy Lightroom last summer for $149(as opposed to $100/year for Photoshop and Lightroom CC).
For reference on OS X 10.5.8 :
PowerMac G5 2.0GHz DP 7,2
CS4
276 seconds
Mac mini 2.0GHz (early 2009)
CS2 (therefore Rosetta)
139.8 seconds
CS4
105.8 seconds
EDIT :
Just for a laugh...
TiBook 667MHz
CS2
1454 seconds ... nearly 25 minutes.
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Unfortunately, I can't do that. Clients send in files in CC, I have to be able to open them.
I admit that pretty much everything I do is for me, with the exceptions being projects taken on for friends.
As my "serious" photography is still primarily on film(mostly 6x6 transparencies and(real) B&W but also some 35mm transparencies, negatives, and B&W), my workflow involves a lot of scanning and scanning also means spot healing/cloning. I stick with the G4 for this since it's the easiest way to run my SCSI film scanner. BTW, I know Nikon Coolscans and the like are cheap now(I may be buying one from a co-worker) but the SCSI Sprintscan I have does "super slides"(3.5x3.5) which allows me to digitize a lot of family stuff.
I use Lightroom 2 on the G4 along with CS4 for the "heavy lifting" and it handles it fine. As I said, I've also gone back and worked with some drum scans I had done several years back, and the G4 handles them very gracefully-in fact far better than I remember my c. 2006 Intel(Windows) laptop handling them.
If I had the space, time, and inclination to learn a whole new skill set I'd pick up one of the(relatively) inexpensive drum scanners on the secondary market. Commercial drum scanning costs a small fortune, although admittedly I know a lot of the reason for that is the time involved.
Again, I do