rosetta

Highly Efficient Rosetta or Darn Slow Photoshop?

When Apple introduced Intel-based Macs, a year ago, it provided comprehensive migration support, as well. Free compiler (program "translating" human-readable source code of programs into "machine code") shipping with OS X is able to produce so-called Universal Binary - code that both old and new processors can understand. So, for many software vendors migration was just a matter of recompiling their source code. Unfortunately, it was more complicated and time-consuming for vendors of large systems where recompilation is not as trivial. Several large software vendors were not able to have their code recompiled and debugged, yet.

To support those more inert, Apple developed technology called Rosetta. Rosetta is a virtualization engine that allows programs, written for old, G# processors to run on Intel-based Macs without changing single line of code. Microsoft Office for Mac, still runs on top of Rosetta, with no plans to recompile it into Universal Binary. Adobe, also, did not have universal binary version of its graphical applications, until recently. In Adobe's case they were very eager to complete the migration, though, as virtualization is a performance hit and performance is important for a graphical information processing software like that from Adobe.

The highlight of and the biggest advancement in the recently released Adobe Creative Suite 3 is the fact that it is compiled in universal binary - with full support of Intel processors and avoiding Rosetta. Adobe is very excited about it and has been honking all over the press how much better/faster the new version is.

Is it really?