Adobe: PC Preferred?

[ewinemiller]

Originally posted by gopher
The problem isn't the G4. It is the developers who won't code for it properly. See my prior post in this thread.

Altivec isn't a magic wand and in a lot of instances isn't really helpful. In a recent product I added Altivec optimizations where they made sense, lots of transforms on the same set of data points. I also did Intel SSE optimizations. The G4 didn't suddenly become monster fast. It was noticably faster than before, but so was the PIII and P4. The G4 didn't gain any ground. I could have taken some more time and made the chunk of code multi-threaded, but that would have taken lots of time (probably introduces lots of bugs) and may not have resulted in any significant improvement because a couple of resource contentions. In any case the pentiums would have also seen a jump on dual boxes if it was there to see.

If a platform requires the a developer to go through major hoops to "code for it properly", it often isn't going to happen and that in itself is a weakness of the platform. To get my product to market in a timely manner, as a developer I want to write straight C++ code. I can drop that code into Visual Studio .NET and it compiles, drop it into CodeWarrior, it compiles, no hassles. For me there is no financial incentive to optimize my code for the G4 any differently than I would optimize my code for anything PIII+.

 

[ktlx]

Originally posted by gopher
It is obvious that both Adobe's site, and this site can't be true.
Someone at Adobe is either:

1. Lying in their teeth.
2. Not optimizing their software for Altivec as Macdevcenter shows how above.

Or possibly not all things can be sped up by a SIMD unit or dual processors. If everything could be sped up by a SIMD unit, they would be much more powerful and plentiful.

 

[ktlx]

Originally posted by ewinemiller
If a platform requires the a developer to go through major hoops to "code for it properly", it often isn't going to happen and that in itself is a weakness of the platform. To get my product to market in a timely manner, as a developer I want to write straight C++ code. I can drop that code into Visual Studio .NET and it compiles, drop it into CodeWarrior, it compiles, no hassles. For me there is no financial incentive to optimize my code for the G4 any differently than I would optimize my code for anything PIII+.

It is a pretty nasty double edged sword for the PowerMac G4. It has the potential to be a very fast machine. In order to tap its full potential, you have to have a problem that naturally benefits from SIMD units and dual processors. But that makes the design and implementation more complex and expensive. And you are doing it for a platform that is loosing market share and a line (the PowerMac) that is not selling well.

 

[kenohki]

One major problem that Apple has right now is that they've lost most of their technical advantage over the years. Now that they've faltered in performance, there is not much left for them to sell the platform on.

Back in the day, Apple had significant functionality and usability advantages over other platforms. PostScript, LocalTalk, and laser printers were common things on the Mac platform back when PCs were still using daisy wheel or dot matrix printers. LocalTalk was much easier to use and configure than NetWare over coax. NuBus offered better performance and was easier to configure than ISA. Apple offered multiple, high resolution, 32-bit color support on the Mac back when CGA and EGA were the status quo. The Mac had an arsenal of great software not to be found on the PC. And the Mac of course, at that time, had a significant usability advantage over DOS or Windows 2.0/3.1.

However, those advantages have all evaporated due to modern hardware, software vendor migration, and the advent of the Windows 9x interface. So what value does the Macintosh bring to the table in this day and age? Well, OS X is a technical marvel (and has been for a while, even back when it was NeXTstep). However, providing minor OS nicities, a good development environment, and a slick GUI won't get you all that far when software like the Adobe apps are written to accomodate the least common denominator (Windows). In cases like that, corporate IT looks at price/performance and the Mac platform falls down right now on that point. Sure, consumer sales and marketshare are great. Apple has done a good job of catering to that segment recently. But let's face it, corporate spending is where the big money is at, and as long as Apple is uncompetitive on a spend basis, they're not going to crack that market. (Not only that, most office computer users buy for home what they have for work.)

So where does this leave us? Well, considering that the processor wars are going to be neck and neck between PPC, x86, EPIC, and x86-64, it's unreasonable to assume that Apple is going to garner a huge advantage in speed. And as long as they keep using commodity PC components and standards as their mainstay, other parts of the subsystem aren't going to rev past their counterparts. What Apple needs to do is to differentiate themselves in a way that makes the price/performance issue irrelevant. They need to find the next DTP. Something that they can bring to the table that another company can't emmulate in a short period of time. DTP brought this first. Multimedia and QuickTime did it again. Granted, other companies managed to make up for lost time, but for a while, Apple provided something that you couldn't find anywhere else. And people were willing to spend to get it. I think this is what they're going to have to do again if they want to get back to that long lost two digit marketshare.

Just my .02

-K

 

[jamilecrire]

Originally posted by razorme
Someone at Adobe is on krak. The illustrations do not match the x-axis. Apparently they couldn't decide if 0.6 means 60 seconds or 36 seconds. In the first illustration, 54 seconds = 0.54 and 1 min 25 = 1.25! (which also = 85 seconds = 0.85???)

The lamers should go back to high school!

Lol, I didn't notice that. If 1.25 = 1 minute 25 seconds the graph should go like this:
-------------------------------------------------
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 1.0 1.1

If any data analyst did this they should be fired post haste. Pathetic really.

 

[-hh]

Place blame only where blame is due.

Originally posted by gopher
The problem isn't the G4. It is the developers who won't code for it properly. See my prior post in this thread.

And yet we know that the current Mac motherboard has significant performance bottlenecks in it that are going to hamstring its performance regardless of how well/poorly coded the application is.

When it comes to the question of developers, the real problem that we have with coding is that hardware performance is cheaper than a programmer's time, so there's no real incentive to seriously optimize the code ... its slap it together in high-level code, debug it, through the compiler, onto a CD and then on to the next project.

So what really becomes significant in the big picture is in the programming support tools. Do a good job there, and "bad" programming won't be a big problem, but do a lousy job there and even a great programming job will slog along like a pig with a pegleg...unless the hardware's so blazingly fast that noone will notice.

IMO, what we probably need to come up with one of these days is some sort of "Programming Performance Quality" (PPQ) benchmarking. Afterall, 100 lines of code will always run faster than 1,000 lines. Creating such a benchmark would serve to separate the issue of coding efficiency from hardware performance.


-hh

 

[AmigaMac]

they're still sweating the MHz Myth?!!

Well whatever Adobe says... blah! I ran various tests a week ago with a friend on Photoshop. It was my TiBook versus his HP Pavilion (laptop) and gave him a good stomp'n! I did have an edge where RAM was concerned, but other than that, he had the upper advantage on everything else (faster CPU, etc...). Oh well I'm not planning on switching ever (regardless of what FUD/RDF Intel sells)!!!

 

[jayscheuerle]

When will it be the time?

I remember hearing stories about how Apple had developed versions of OSX to run on X86 processors. Just how big of a gap would be needed for them to decide that it was time to migrate? 3x as fast? 4x as fast?

My beige G3 has had some problems with OSX lately & perhaps it is dying on me. I'm looking at the bottom of the line G4 towers for $1500 versus a bottom of the line PC for $400 that I could completely trick out for another $400 (over time if I wanted) and barely be past half the price of the G4.

What's stopping me?
1) The G3 still works.
2) Software
3) I like OSX

But, heck, there are 14" PC laptops for under $1000...

I really don't need the power of these top-o-the-line processors, but it seems like somebody's been asleep at the wheel... - j

 

[hacurio1]

Originally posted by acj
I put XP on an old dell laptop. It was a pentium 2 or 3 366MHz (I think) with just 128mb ram, and it was fast. It booted in 30 seconds, loaded photoshop, ie, and office fast. It even ran all three fine. XP is bad, but OSX is a resource pig.

You can say a three year old Mac is less out of date than a three year old PC, but that's just because Macs havn't been advancing so fast. As said before, lets hope this article proves to help the Mac platform rather than hinder it.

OK, Plain and simple......you are making it up. Why?
Because you can barely run XP in a PII at 366!!!!!!

If you had a dell with a PII it probably came with a 2 or 3 GB HardDrive. Did you but a new one because XP requires at lest 1.5 GB. Also, 128 MB of RAM is a minimum requirement so you are probably confused! An IBM ThinkPad with a P4 at 1.4 GHz takes more than 30 seconds to startup XP and it has a 30Gb HD and 512Mb of RAM.
I’m sorry, I DON”T BELIVE YOU…so please support your claims and show us
some pictures!!!!

JAJA…I have this feeling that you won’t!!!!

 

[robd]

Geez, when we people realize that it's not always about speed! It's about the quality of the interface, the ease of use of the interface,
the ability to get work done smoothly, easily, and with the fewest reboots. And it's about the
right of all human beings to look at something that has been designed and is pleasing to the eye for 10 hours a day as opposed to something that is simply functional.

Rob

 

[mangoman]

Originally posted by JD!
What's to add??? The Mac got it's butt kicked and will continue to do so until SOMEBODY......ANYBODY.....in Apple will at least divulge some info on what's coming. The Pro community is changing...quickly....due to the silence at Apple. What a shame. C'mon Apple....what the Hell is going on??? Give us all a freakin hint will ya??? You can't sell slow, and people are fed up waiting on rumor and blind hope. These latest tests confirm that we are falling way behind. This loyal Apple user for one is sick and tired of waiting.....waiting..........

At first I was miffed at Adobe, but you know what, kids? You're right. Apple needs to stop playing this silly-ass game of silence and say something. ANYTHING. This goes for other products, too, beyond the pro towers. Take the iPod for example (thread suddenly slides off the tracks, killing all on board).

APPLE: WAKE UP. NOW.

 

[gopher]

Agreed. The ease of use, and the ease of setting up make a world of difference on the Mac. How many registry entries have you had to redo on the Mac? How frequently do you have to run scandisk on the Mac? How frequently do you have to reinstall the operating system on the Mac? How hard is navigating the multi-column finder in Mac OS X compared to trees of folders that can go on forever. Now that 10.2 includes spring loaded folders it is that much easier. If it was any easier to use a Mac I'd give it to a two year old. The fact that two and three year olds can run Macs just fine says that PCs have a long ways to go in making themselves easy to use.

When you make something easy to use and setup you save time. And when you save time you do things faster. That's irrespective of the processor speed. Oh and here is an ironic twist. By having less software than the competitor, it means you spend less time searching for the right software for the job. When you have an overwhelming number of software titles, you never know which one is the best one to do the job until you read review after review. Ease of use by making choice simpler.
Thus in at least one way the relative scarcity of Mac software titles has made our lives easier.

http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html#MACOSXNATIVE shows you where you can search for Mac OS X native software and hardware.

Granted having misrepresented benchmarks by Adobe doesn't make our argument easier, but other things do.

 

[mangoman]

Re: about switching

Originally posted by groov'
hi apple-lovers (like me)

For the REAL work I had to switch to the evil empire already - it's so cheap that you can easily do that ... waiting waiting and still more waiting for better times on our preferred platform.

In the meantime wife and kids have a lot of fun with my old macs.

Wow. What a sorry state of affairs this whole hardware issue has become...

Apple?

Apple?

(sound of crickets...)

Apple?

Beuller?

Beuller?

Beuller?

 

[RIP]

Does this mean that...

Sales of PC software is hurting and this is Adobe's way of improving sales? By backstabbing Adobe's faithful?

Scoundrels.

 

[backdraft]

The tests were performed in Mac OS X 10.2.1 instead of OS 9. We all KNOW that OS 9 is faster than OS X. Its also not a fair comparison either, the PC with RDRAM the Mac with DDR not to mention Windows XP has 64bit graphics while OS X has 128bit graphics, more cpu power is used to render the 128bit GUI versus the 64bit GUI.

oh well... PowerPC 970 ='s solution

 

[yzedf]

Originally posted by NavyIntel007
Ok, first off I've heard Adobe isn't dual processor aware (forgive me if I made that up)

Second...

PC vs. Mac: which one ages faster.

Lets take a PC and a Mac that are 3 years old, put the latest OS (Win XP, OS X) in them and give them similar Hard drives, video cards and ram. Which one would perform faster?

If the Mac performs faster over time, it's a selling point saying that even though it doesn't run as fast as a PC the performance will not degrade as fast.

I don't know this for sure, I just know that people are still using 3-5 year old macs with OS X, where 3-5 year old PC's cannot handle XP.

My 1999 IBM laptop can run XP just fine, if I chose to (I use linux). Apple performance does not "degrade" as fast as PC's because it takes more time for Apple to get the same speed increase as Intel/AMD does.

 

[yzedf]

Re: Uhm, Adobe doesn't support dual processors well

Originally posted by GregGomer
Looking at this article, it reminded me of another bench mark I saw comparing a 1 GIG, to a Dual 867 and a Dual 1GIG, and a Dual 1.25.

All the Dual processor machines ran adobe about as well as the single processor. Their explanation was that the adobe apps don't take advantage of the dual processors.

So when you are using say Photoshop on a Dual GIG G4, it only takes full advantage of one of the processors, which basically will have the same performacne as a single processor 1 GIG.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if that is the case, then Adobe Apps aren't the the best apps to benchmark dual proc G4s. Unfortunately there aren't many apps that are Dual processor aware, like Final Cut Pro or DVD studio pro and those don't work on a PC, so you can't use those to get a fair benchmark.

Anyhoo, food for thought, wish I had the link that compared the Adobe apps on single and dual processors, if anyone else can shed some light on this please do.

Flip side of that coin is that it takes two G4 procs to keep up with one Intel proc. That is not a good message.

 

[yzedf]

Originally posted by gopher
Agreed. The ease of use, and the ease of setting up make a world of difference on the Mac. How many registry entries have you had to redo on the Mac? How frequently do you have to run scandisk on the Mac? How frequently do you have to reinstall the operating system on the Mac? How hard is navigating the multi-column finder in Mac OS X compared to trees of folders that can go on forever. Now that 10.2 includes spring loaded folders it is that much easier. If it was any easier to use a Mac I'd give it to a two year old. The fact that two and three year olds can run Macs just fine says that PCs have a long ways to go in making themselves easy to use.

When you make something easy to use and setup you save time. And when you save time you do things faster. That's irrespective of the processor speed. Oh and here is an ironic twist. By having less software than the competitor, it means you spend less time searching for the right software for the job. When you have an overwhelming number of software titles, you never know which one is the best one to do the job until you read review after review. Ease of use by making choice simpler.
Thus in at least one way the relative scarcity of Mac software titles has made our lives easier.

http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html#MACOSXNATIVE shows you where you can search for Mac OS X native software and hardware.

Granted having misrepresented benchmarks by Adobe doesn't make our argument easier, but other things do.

How often do you hear about people repairing permissions? PRAM? OS X doing stupid things, some requiring re-install? iMovie 3?

Microsoft does not own the right to release buggy software. Apple does it to.

 

[trevorteusc]

I am an Apple fan, and I do not like Windows, but even the zealots have to see how much of a slap in the face this is to Apple. They have to start talking about the future of the PowerMac in public. They need to assure the graphics houses that there is something worth waiting for, other than another nifty update to iChat.

I am an Apple fan as well, and I hate to hear news like this, but I have to agree that it is time for Apple to address this issue head-on. Fancy eye-candyesque 'iApps' are nice, but a thousand iApps won't hide the fact that Apple's computers are rapidly falling farther and farther behind while remaining too expensive. If things don't change, sooner or later, even the most devoted fans (myself included) will have to make a change away from Apple. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the current rumors about the IBM PowerPC 970 are true.

 

[3-22]

Adobe and Dell?

Looks to me Adobe has an agenda to sell Dell hardware (or at least push it) After the "comparison" part, the link at the bottom for "gear" takes you to a Dell purchase page...

If Adobe is getting in bed with Dell, this isn't good for Apple...

 

[Frobozz]

Also titled:

"Reason #1,576 the 970's will be out no later than September."

 

[jgracia]

Adobe means no harm for Apple. It´s a push to move to faster hardware... That´s all!

 

[Frobozz]

Originally posted by backdraft
The tests were performed in Mac OS X 10.2.1 instead of OS 9. We all KNOW that OS 9 is faster than OS X. Its also not a fair comparison either, the PC with RDRAM the Mac with DDR not to mention Windows XP has 64bit graphics while OS X has 128bit graphics, more cpu power is used to render the 128bit GUI versus the 64bit GUI.

oh well... PowerPC 970 ='s solution

OS X is not slower than OS 9. OS 9 allows one thing to happen at a time, first of all. Second, Carbon applications are slower than native Cocoa apps. Since we have ZERO major commercial applications built in Cocoa, we'll never know just how fast out machines can be. In pure performance, the difference should be slim to none.

 

[robotrenegade]

The specs are only seconds difference. Do you really care?

 

[ktlx]

Re: Adobe and Dell?

Originally posted by 3-22
Looks to me Adobe has an agenda to sell Dell hardware (or at least push it) After the "comparison" part, the link at the bottom for "gear" takes you to a Dell purchase page...

If Adobe is getting in bed with Dell, this isn't good for Apple...

Or maybe, heaven forbid, that Adobe is looking out for its customers and trying to provide them with more information rather than myths. It probably is nothing more than Adobe saying, "if you have roughly $3K to spend and you use our software for video editing, PCs are significantly faster."

If you are a professional computer user, as opposed to a three year old, the usability differences between Mac OS X and XP are way overblown. Neither one requires a rocket scientist if you have good hardware instead of some cheap-ass cobbled together $600 PC with no name components.