Comments on: A 64-bit reality check

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:32:12 +0000

People are missing the main reason for 64 bit. Stability is way better than 32 bit. I been using windows 64 bit OS for Years now. I noticed less BSOD. Fewer reinstalls of OS. So I would not say keeping 32 bit is better just because its faster. Don’t you remember the saying “Quality not Quantity”. Apparently no one wants Quality anymore.

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:39:16 +0000

Begin to make softwares that are not so heavy and slow and use tons of RAM for nothing …
And what about this crap of Flash Player ???? 100 % of CPU and 90 % of RAM to play crappy ads on a web page !
Are you kiding John Nack ??? !
[What does this have to do with 64-bit? --J.]
Go to work on optimisation of your softwares first, because you have work to be done to unbloat them and make them fast !
I want the reactivity of Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10, plus a Flash that works like when it was made by Macromedia !
Then you will be able to say what you want about others, but for now it doesn’t look for tomorrow ….

By: Jamey

Jamey — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:24:08 +0000

Let me just add that Adobe has improved their products tremendously from my viewpoint. I do Graphic and Web design, Video, CAD and 3D. I use the entire Adobe suite in some fashion with all my work. I like the CS4 suite A TON better than CS2. However, given the availability of today’s multi-core processors, massive amounts of RAM and multiple GPU’s in a home desktop PC for little cost. I just wish ALL the Adobe products utilized multi-cores, gpu’s and tons of RAM better so I noticed a GREATER speed improvement with the CS4 suite. That’s my opinion, but I’m just an artist.

By: Jamey

Jamey — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:48:23 +0000

All I know is that I want my daily work flow FASTER same as most people. So I check the internet to see what people say about CS4. I’m currently using CS2. I read things like After Effects CS4 can utilize multiple cores IF you can allocate 2GB of RAM per core. OK, I also read you can access more RAM using a 64 bit OS. OK, so I go out and build a system with the Quad Core Phenom 2.6GHZ, 16GB of 800MHZ RAM, Dual ATI 4870 video cards running in crossfire, 2 Velociraptor’s(RAID 0) and Windows XP 64 bit. I install the 30 day trial of CS4 and it won’t install correctly. So I install Windows 7 RC1 64 bit and then reinstall CS4 trial. I haven’t had a hiccup or glitch in 28 days, runs great. HOWEVER, I’ve rendered the same AE CS4 projects on the Desktop System as well as on my 13″ black MacBook with Intel Dual Core and 2GB of ram with Bootcamp running WinXP 32 bit. They both render the projects in the same amount of time. I’m a little disappointed. Recently I purchased Swift 3D V6 which they claim utilizes multiple cores. When I render a project in Swift on the Desktop I CAN ACTUALLY SEE all four processors working to render the project twice as fast as the dual core Macbook renders. This is all I’m looking for. Adobe, I buy your software. I use it everyday to TRY and make a living. I don’t care if its 32bit, 64bit, more RAM less RAM, Esperanto or C++. I care about the end result. When I read about how your latest software is faster with today’s Multicore Processors and its ability to access more RAM that when I purchase this system IT IS FASTER, and I can see it’s faster. I can honestly say AE CS4 rendered 5% faster than AE CS2 on the same projects on the desktop. But it stayed the same on the Laptop.

By: Laurence 'GreenReaper' Parry

Laurence 'GreenReaper' Parry — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:33:39 +0000

Totally agree that 64-bit doesn’t make sense for everyone. I have a complex consumer application coded in .NET that runs three or four times as slow on x64 as it did on x86, and uses three times as much memory, unless you force it to run in 32-bit mode.
I understand it’s due in part to non-optimized marshaling code. They’re working on that for .NET 4.0, which is nice, but we need speed now – and I’m willing to bet 32-bit will still have an edge due to increased pointer sizes (Windows Forms loves pointers).

By: Laurence 'GreenReaper' Parry

Laurence 'GreenReaper' Parry — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:29:02 +0000

There was a recent story about this - apparently you can get access to all the memory you can load onto your system on a 32-bit Windows OS if you crack the kernel: http://www.geoffchappell.com/viewer.htm?doc=notes/windows/license/memory.htm It worked for me - I got 4GB where I had 3GB. Your mileage may differ.

By: Jp Cooper

Jp Cooper — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:55:50 +0000

The “marketing” happens because the general public seems to have a need to latch onto the latest “buzz”.
Remember Intel and AMD pushing the Mega-Hertz on processors? The Megahertz Myth.
And now – it’s how many Cores does your processor have?
While on the software front it’s how 32-bit Apps are old and out-dated and even MS Word should be running in 64-bit mode. Can’t wait!

By: Sue

Sue — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:12:40 +0000

A lot of people are saying that if Apple breaks things going from 10.5 to 10.6, that it’s Adobe’s problem to fix it? Yet if the Microsoft broke iTunes 2.0 on Windows7, would you blame the Apple or Microsoft?

By: vex

vex — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:47:07 +0000

I’ll second this. Anything that needs to talk to graphics hardware, traverse large amounts of data, or plugs into software that does *really* needs to be available in 64bit variations. All well and good to say that no flash application needs 64bits, but there are legitimate situations where adobe is losing out by failing to deliver a flash plugin for (say) 64bit browers.

By: David Every

David Every — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:30:34 +0000

Porting from 32 to 64 bits is just throwing a compiler flag and a few macros. Oh, and making sure every variable is typed correctly, making sure every structure still aligns correctly, making sure that the assembler optimized versions of routines are also staying aligned correctly wrt to C, C++ and ObjC versions above, across multiple platforms, fixing whole sections of the code which might be calling versions of the API’s that went away and finding or rewriting to alternatives, and maybe doing the same for driver changes. Oh, and in the case of Mac, since Apple killed 64 bit Carbon, it means rewriting major chunks of an App to port from a low level API to a higher level framework/class library, that may or may not have the functionality you need (and since there will be differences, it means you need to rewrite to those changes). All in dozens of libraries, plug-ins, code, teams, across a few millions of lines of code — while testing, finding and removing all new bugs introduced by any typos, mistakes or failing to catch and fix every change listed above. Simple, right? Just like sending a man to the moon: you only need more thrust than weight to create a rocket, and you’re there. Almost.

By: Remush

Remush — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:59:32 +0000

Well,
your knowledge of computers seems to be limited to those which hardware is allowing that much that you can afford
with your limited budget.
You seem ignoring that there are computers on the market with a superior architecture.
Of course, bugs are bugs and it is a good opportunity to remove some of them (usually adding new ones) while converting from 32 to 64 bits.
Again, if the original code were written by a professional (not by an amateur) it would be a piece of cake invoking the proper routine written in 64 bits from one running in 32 on a ad-hoc architecture.
I guess this looks like magic to you on the proto-hardware you know.
Perhaps it’s time to throw everything away and restart the job from scratch using modern programming techniques, allowing for change and further hardware improvements.
BTW, I know more ways to wrongly pass and retrieve pointers that you can imagine as I had to fix amateur code.
(unfortunately this happens in 64 bits as well as in 32 unless you program in JAVA. Amateurs, please use JAVA for God sake! It’s not that fast YET, but at least it does the job on the current (obsolete) hardware)

By: James Gentile

James Gentile — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:58:44 +0000

One thing that’s overlooked, is that if the industry moved to 64-bit, MS and Apple could transition to “64-bit ASLR” (address space layout randomization – a security feature that prevents exploits by making the addresses of code and data structures hard to guess) for 64-bit apps. 64-bit ASLR would be an awesome security technology to have, because 32-bit ASLR is not as secure.

By: Linux Fan

Linux Fan — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:04:58 +0000

Remush:
Porting software to 64 bits (regardless of API) is more than changing some macros and recompiling. There are lots of math assumptions that will have been made and need to be fixed. There are math errors that will have been made, but happened to work in 32 bits – those have to be fixed as well. There are changes in the APIs (because the APIs assumed 32 bit quantities/structures) – those have to be changed. Then there are APIs defined by the application that need to be changed, documented and tested.
And assembly does not port that easily at all. It may compile for 64 bits, but as soon as you hand 32 bit assembly a 64 bit pointer, you will crash.
Please, get some experience writing applications before commenting about how easy they are to write.

By: Brian Sexton

Brian Sexton — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:23:40 +0000

I would like to see 64-bit versions of Adobe software available for GNU/Linux—starting with Flash Player and AIR, of course—just so we can run them on 64-bit systems without hassles. I may never need more than 4GB of memory for Flash Player or AIR, but just getting applications to run shouldn’t be hard.

By: Remush

Remush — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:10:38 +0000

What is stupid is rewriting code in Esperanto. Anyway what does that mean? In C or C++ (and others), you just need to define some macros and make some global changes. It’s fairly straightforward.
On the other hand, writing in such a way that the user interface can be easily translated to Esperanto, and from there, to other languages, is slim. It is not as easy as one would think. The problem is that the file containing the text to translate should also contain enough information about the context. English is particularly ambiguous compared with Esperanto.
On the systems I use, converting from 32bits to 64 merely requires a recompilation (yes in assembler as well as in HLL’s). The system routines (drivers) are written in 64 bits and the hardware is capable of switching from 32 bit mode to 64 automatically.