[tiiger]

From an earlier post in a different thread...

Yes, Adobe CS 2 will run, but in emulation! How fast is your current machine? If you have a G5, CS 2 will feel much slower under emulation. If you have a G4, it probably wouldn't be a huge difference in speed, for most CS 2 tasks.

Ok, my graphic-designer wife who now has a G4 PowerBook just ordered the MacBook Pro... She uses Adobe Illustrator all the time. We were impressed by the specs of the new machine, but did we jump the gun?

What does it mean to run "in emulation"?

Do we need to wait for new versions/upgrades from Adobe that are "native" for the new processor? (I'm not seeing anything on the Apple or Adobe websites about this.)

Anyone have any insights about such things?

[Wraven]

tiiger,
Relax. As has been said, the Adobe apps will run fine in emulation, but maybe a bit slow. They SHOULD, however, be faster than the PowerBook (even in emulation). There is an article on ArsTechnica which shows some performance numbers for the Core Duo iMac (which has the same processor / architecture as the MBP). I am too lazy to link it but you should be able to get to it from the Ars main page.

So in short, yes in a few months when the Adobe universal binaries come out, the MBP will get a nice free (or at least cheap) speed boost. But even when the MBP ships in February it should be faster, or at the very worst, just as fast as the PowerBook G4 running CS 2.

[ghoti]

Emulation means that the program that was compiled to run on a PowerPC CPU is translated into the Intel x86 machine code. This takes a bit of time, and the produced code is slower than if compiled directly for the Intel. But Illustrator should be fine, Photoshop filters are going to be really slow.

In any case, it will probably pay off to get the native applications once they come out (depending on what Adobe will charge for them).

[Blue Light Bandit]

Programs are made up of strings of 0s and 1s that make up instructions for the CPU like add, move, and so forth. Every CPU architecture has its own language. So, PowerPC chips might understand 01101101 for the add command and x86 might understand 10010100 for the add command. (Note that these are fictitious but representative examples; I don't know the actual binary representations for these words.)

That's why x86 and PowerPC software cannot "natively" run on opposing architectures. The language of one is complete gibberish to the other. On top of that, there may be x86 words with no PPC equivalent and vice versa, making things even more complicated.

The Rosetta emulation system acts as a translator. On the fly, it takes strings of bits and converts them from one language to another. This is an extremely computationally-intense process, as you've probably seen by people who've used Virtual PC and other emulators. Rosetta, however, benefits slightly in that it looks at large chunks of commands instead of individual ones and it doesn't have the overhead of emulating a "whole computer" (instead, just a single application).

When it comes to advice like this, the MacBook Pro is a special case. The old PowerBooks were seriously (but unintentionally) crippled by certain hardware limitations, so much that even software running through emulation on the MacBook Pro may out-perform the old PowerBooks. If you look at the iMac G5 versus iMac Duo, though, you'll see that that the Intel solution isn't so great and sometimes even "native" code that doesn't need translating performs slower on the new Intel systems. So, you see, it's a big mixed bag of ups and downs.

Does that help?