In a total reversal of what Windows and Macintosh users might expect, Adobe Creative Suite 4 will include 64-bit support for the Windows platform, but not for Mac.
According to Adobe's Photoshop product manager, John Nack, Mac OS X users won't get 64-bit support until the next release of the graphics editing software, CS5.
Nack attributes this move to the decision Apple made last year to stop development of 64-bit support for Carbon, a move which Nack says took Adobe and other third-party developers by surprise. Adobe did make CS3 Intel-compatible, but has retained Carbon as its foundation.
Nack wrote, in a recent blog entry, "At the WWDC show last June, [Adobe and] other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa [instead of] Carbon".
"We'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa."
According to Nack, 64-bit support in Photoshop offers huge speed advantages for those who typically work with large images on systems with RAM of about 32GB and up. Even normal users will possibly see a performance increase of 8% to 12% when using the 64-bit version of Adobe's software compared to 32-bit.
Unfortunately, this means Mac OS X users are not able to take advantage of the performance gains in CS4, and those who work with massive images will need to use Windows until CS5 is released further down the road.
A Note: Ironically, when Photoshop was initially released back in 1988, the software was available for Macintosh only. The product didn't even ship for Microsoft's platform until 1992, when Adobe ported Photoshop 2.0 to Windows.
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