Adobe CS2 running on Intel machines - Rosetta?

mudfrog

Registered
I've heard that the Adobe CS2 software does not run natively on the Intel mac platform.
Is this correct? Where I work we have currently purchased the CS2 licence but at the moment only have 1 machine running on the Intel platform running the CS software, but could be upgrading any G4's we have with G5's and as all new Apple macs are now running on the Intel platform this could be an issue.
Now I've heard about Rosetta but could somebody explain a bit more about this please.
And I've also heard that CS2 running in Rosetta on an Intel G5 would be no faster than a G4 with a load more Ram installed.

As you can tell from the above speal, I have heard alot :D but have no real concreate information, hence me asking the questions.

Any help with information would be great.

Rich
 
you say Intel G5, but that's a contradiction in terms, the G5 was the PowerPC predecessor of the Intel Core chips. iMacs dow ship with Intel Core 2 Duo's inside them.

Rosetta, yes, is the technology that emulates the G3/G4/G5 architecture (PowerPC) on the fly, and in the background, an invisible layer.
Traditionally, Emulation has been rubbish, did you ever use Virtual PC? that emulated a windows environment on PPC macs, and the speed differences was excruciating, the best it could do was emulate a Pentium II 400mhz, i believe...

Rosetta manages to be 'fast enough', with users noticing slightly longer load times, and lots of ram usage, but other than that, a smootth operation.

here's one review, from a user on here:
http://macosx.com/forums/intel-mac-system-software/280442-macpro-3ghz-versus-g5-dual-2-0-ghz.html
 
Apologies, yes I see what you mean i.e. G5=PowerPC, Mac Pro=Intel
I didn't realize they were re-branding the machines from G5 to Mac Pro's :eek:

I haven't used Virtual PC before but to be honest I probably wouldn't anyway.
I'll do a bit more digging me thinks :)

But thanks for the info. I will checkout the link.

Regards,

Richard
 
I run adobe CS2 on my mac pro... and run photoshop cs1 on my mac book...both intel

cant see any difference. I ran the photoshop cs1 on my old G3... no difference in the performance.
 
I have to say I definetly notice a slow-down. Coming from a 933 G4 1 Gig RAM with PS7, to a Core2 Dou iMac 2.16 1 Gig RAM with CS2. I have noticed it takes forever to swap over to Photoshop when I have anything in my paste-board. Looking at the benchmarks, my CS2 seems to run slower. But I did get a huge improvement on file searches. My old G4 would choke as I type in a word to searach - trying to search on part of the word as I type it. Now it flies.
 
Adobe CS 3 is on its way. There's rumours about a public beta for users of CS 2 to be unleashed before year's end, and the release should be in a March/April 2007 timeframe.
 
Mac Pros should give you respectable performance - more in line with a G5 than a G4. Keep in mind that ALL the Mac Pros have four cores, while only the last high-end G5 had four cores. Mac Pros will perform a LOT better than iMacs or other systems, which only have two cores.

One thing to consider is that Rosetta requires a lot of RAM. If you're using PPC apps on an Intel machine, you'll want more RAM than you'd need running those same apps on a PPC machine. 1GB was pretty comfy on PPC machines, but I recommend 2 on Intels. I think that explains Rastermon's negative experience. The benchmarks Viro posted were based on machines with more RAM than Photoshop could even use, and the results were very good.
 
Checking my processes, I see photoshop is listing 1.5 Gb as a virtual size, and I don't have anything open in it now. Would that be a symptom of my performance? Keeping in mind I only have 1 Gig RAM (didn't expect to ever say that)
Processes: 56 total, 2 running, 54 sleeping... 190 threads 14:25:16
Load Avg: 0.24, 0.28, 0.35 CPU usage: 10.6% user, 5.0% sys, 84.4% idle
SharedLibs: num = 180, resident = 39.1M code, 5.11M data, 5.92M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 10780, resident = 373M + 9.14M private, 168M shared
PhysMem: 133M wired, 330M active, 372M inactive, 836M used, 187M free
VM: 7.79G + 120M 125606(0) pageins, 138362(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
513 top 8.0% 0:00.76 1 18 20 952K 688K 1.41M 26.9M
501 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.03 1 15 19 416K 976K 940K 31.1M
499 Terminal 0.6% 0:02.10 4 91 138 2.12M 10.2M 8.89M 216M
494 Safari 0.0% 0:16.03 6 129 301 20.8M 18.9M 30.4M 246M
462 mdimport 0.0% 0:00.21 4 65 109 1.31M 3.64M 3.92M 57.4M
362 AppleSpell 0.0% 0:00.03 1 33 34 688K 1.57M 1.89M 37.8M
360 TextEdit 0.0% 0:03.33 1 71 163 2.63M 18.6M 13.0M 222M
286 Fireworks 7.9% 18:15.48 11 165 784 150M 51.4M 176M 724M
259 smbd 0.0% 0:04.62 1 30 62 1004K 4.88M 4.02M 32.8M
216 Adobe LM S 0.0% 0:02.26 3 53 158 2.52M 12.4M 3.05M 158M
214 Adobe Phot 2.6% 14:08.92 8 161 4890 120M 41.6M 133M 1.52G
212 FreeHand 1 0.8% 3:01.17 4 130 364 19.4M 21.1M 14.4M 476M
211 cupsd 0.0% 0:00.31 2 29 25 392K 1016K 520K 27.9M
 
Back
Top