# Ultimate Photographer's Computer-Cores vs. Clock Speed



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

In a completely unrelated search engine tangent, ran across this article a couple of days ago. It's a bit dated (May 13, 2010) but sends home some important issues with most photography-based software, especially Photoshop.



> This special report takes a photographer’s viewpoint on the Apple Mac Pro, asking whether eight cores is really better than four.


They've also all but eliminated the restrictions imposed by typical hard drives in using 2 & 3 drive SSD RAID's.

The issue?



> None of the RAW-file converters make full use of CPU resources. Put simply, this is the result of poor software engineering, notwithstanding the lame excuses you’re bound to hear from software vendors.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...


Not just limited to RAW converters, unfortunately. The meat of the matter is on pages 4 & 5. 

Save the money you were going to spend on that 8 or 12 core for more memory & a couple of SSD's. You'll not only be money ahead, you'll be computer ahead.



> The best choice for 95% of the photographers out there is the 3.33GHz quad-core model.


Definitely going to play a factor when it comes time to replace our Mac Pro. We'll look at the fastest 4 core we can buy & go from there. No point in having 2 to 8 expensive cores doing nothing more than lighting up Activity Monitor...

Adobe, are you listening?


----------



## Guest (Mar 23, 2011)

Not a big surprise at all. I have an 8-core w/ hyper-threading (giving me 16 pseudo cores) ... even when doing large batches with LightRoom -- which is probably some of the newest code in the Adobe codebase -- it barely uses any threading most of the time. About the only thing I see use any amount of threading is jpg outputs, and even then not much more than a couple/few at best.

Don't hold your breath on Adobe resolving this in any kind of timely fashion ... the problem is that with the kind of low level threading support (and the management required of said threading) required Adobe would probably have to rewrite photoshop from the ground up to get anywhere near that kind of utilization of 4+ cores.


----------



## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

Adobe has been incredibly slow to take advantage of new architecture. 

The excuse of backwards compatibility does not quite cut it. A better solution is to keep the older products available for those still using the older computers. The newer products need to concentrate not on creating an extra bell or whistle but taking full advantage of the hardware currently available.


----------



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

mguertin said:


> Adobe would probably have to rewrite photoshop from the ground up to get anywhere near that kind of utilization of 4+ cores.


While I understand & agree, I wonder why this couldn't have been done during the upgrade to Cocoa & 64 bit (CS5). 

CS4 was 64 bit compatible for Winblows, why, when they had to rewrite much of the code for Mac anyway, didn't they bother optimizing it? They had an extra 18 months or so between revisions.


----------



## Guest (Mar 23, 2011)

Actually I have to chime in on something here ...



> None of the RAW-file converters make full use of CPU resources. Put simply, this is the result of poor software engineering, notwithstanding the lame excuses you’re bound to hear from software vendors.


This, to me, loses this article a LOT of credibility. It tells me that they obviously have little to no understanding of actually engineering software specifically in regards to working with the RAW format itself. As for the "lame excuses" I'd be interested to hear the actual "excuses" that the software vendors have to say on this area because I'd be willing to bet they aren't actually always excuses but possibly true limitations ... RAW processing is done sequentially, meaning that you start at pixel one and work your way down to pixel "n" at the end of things and there's really no way around that. Given that bit of knowledge, just how do you take that very large processing task and parcel it up into pieces to send it to multiple threads that may or may not finish at the same time, given the reliance on the previous pixel being processed in order to properly process the next one "decision" wise ... this is the biggest hurdle here. When you're doing things like rendering plugins or rendering out video frames where you don't need to wait on other information from previous renders knock yourself out with the threads (as long as Adobe's pipeline in Photoshop supports it, which I doubt).

That said there are a lot of other things that can and should be tweaked within the RAW workflow to be more efficient ... but them saying things like this out of hand just goes to show their ignorance on this matter, which in turns put's a lot of their other "statements of fact" to the question. Their overall conclusion is correct, but I think that they have taken potshots/wild guesses on other things based on biased opinions of what they "think" things should work like.

This also holds true of a LOT of other things in the software engineering world ... multi-threading is not something that can "just work" for all types of computing. In fact it's quite a challenge to find ways to make many things work like this and requires some serious skill and planning to properly manage them. This is why multi-core systems are not really ideal and why they didn't really start pushing them until they hit the wall on clock speed ... they needed something to do the yearly refreshes and sell more newer computers. 

At the end of the day how many people that use MacPro's really fully utilize all the cores in them? About the only time I do is when I am doing some serious video encoding/rendering and even then I typically have enough overhead left on the machine to continue using web browsers and the like in the foreground and barely notice that 14 of the 16 cores are maxed out


----------



## Guest (Mar 23, 2011)

FeXL said:


> While I understand & agree, I wonder why this couldn't have been done during the upgrade to Cocoa & 64 bit (CS5).
> 
> CS4 was 64 bit compatible for Winblows, why, when they had to rewrite much of the code for Mac anyway, didn't they bother optimizing it? They had an extra 18 months or so between revisions.


Supporting 64bit on windows and OSX are totally different beasts. 64bit windows is a monolithic type approach, meaning if you're OS is 64bit everything is 64bit. OSX takes a completely different approach to things.

Also consider that rewriting the entire core of Photoshop would not be a walk in the park at all. They would probably have to rewrite pretty much the entire app at that point ... so thinking that way around, do you think 18 months is enough time to completely rewrite photoshop from the ground up AND add all kinds of new bells and whistles to it? I honestly think it would take years at the very least. PS is probably one of the more complex programs in Adobe's arsenal and it definitely has the longest roots (legacy).


----------



## Guest (Mar 23, 2011)

eMacMan said:


> Adobe has been incredibly slow to take advantage of new architecture.
> 
> The excuse of backwards compatibility does not quite cut it. A better solution is to keep the older products available for those still using the older computers. The newer products need to concentrate not on creating an extra bell or whistle but taking full advantage of the hardware currently available.


But how, in a marketing sense, would you sell this to customers?

"Hi, our newest version is amazing! It takes full advantage of your hardware. Why no, there are no new features, and yes it looks exactly like the previous version, but it's faster and more efficient!"

People would be screaming from the highest blogs to be found that it was a huge ripoff and was nothing but a money grab.

The only way I've ever seen something like this pulled off was to have Steve Jobs at the wheel and to charge only $35 for the upgrade  Even at that it wasn't anywhere near a full rewrite to take "full advantage" of your hardware, it was simply a big cleanup. Now think about how long they took doing that simple "cleanup" of things and consider that, believe it or not, an OS is probably a lot less complex coding wise than photoshop is at the end of the day due to the fact that a ton of the low lee stuff in the OS are actually other projects that other developers are working on and you're just pulling in updates for and possibly adding some small tweaks to.


----------



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

mguertin said:


> Also consider that rewriting the entire core of Photoshop would not be a walk in the park at all. They would probably have to rewrite pretty much the entire app at that point ... so thinking that way around, do you think 18 months is enough time to completely rewrite photoshop from the ground up AND add all kinds of new bells and whistles to it? I honestly think it would take years at the very least. PS is probably one of the more complex programs in Adobe's arsenal and it definitely has the longest roots (legacy).


Don't get me wrong, I understand that PS is huge, code wise. Yes, it would take a ground up rebuild. However, we've had multicore processors in Macs ever since Intel CPU's were installed, 5 years ago. They're hardly new.

And, with Adobe coding one to two revisions ahead, this is long, long overdue.


----------



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

mguertin said:


> At the end of the day how many people that use MacPro's really fully utilize all the cores in them? About the only time I do is when I am doing some serious video encoding/rendering and even then I typically have enough overhead left on the machine to continue using web browsers and the like in the foreground and barely notice that 14 of the 16 cores are maxed out


I liken my use of our Mac Pro to a dragster. Much of the time it is merely idling away. Then, it's race day & I need it to go like a bat out of hell. 

However, when I need the horsepower & hit the gas for the 1/4 mile, it's just not there. There are times when I'll have an action running in PS, resizing an image in PhotoZoom (older version than listed in the link), surfing and have a few other, lesser things going on in the background. Never, ever, have I seen Activity Monitor even approach 300%. Very rarely it will even hit 250%. PS rarely goes to 150%, PZ will typically go 105%. 

We've seen a significant slowdown since we've started using the new camera which produces larger files. On the 8 MB files from the older body it was almost bearable. With the 16's, it's brutal, especially in a time crunch situation like event photography when you're processing hundreds of files at a time. This is probably also one of the most resource intensive times for us, with PS, Photo Mechanic & GraphicConverter running at any given time.

Sure, we're running an older 1,1 Mac Pro, memory issues & all, but there's still 12GB of RAM & it's a 4 core running @ 3.0. With good code this thing should just hook up & run. It infuriates me to know that, after all the money I've shelled out for the software, all I'm getting is some shiny stuff & nothing really new under the hood. It's still the same old straight six.

I'll take the V-12 version, multi-threaded & multi-processed, tomorrow if you can. I'll even pay full upgrade 'cause the sucka will pay for itself in the first couple months.


----------



## Guest (Mar 23, 2011)

FeXL said:


> I'll take the V-12 version, multi-threaded & multi-processed, tomorrow if you can. I'll even pay full upgrade 'cause the sucka will pay for itself in the first couple months.


I'm with ya on that one, but I have to say that for the public in general it's still an incredibly hard sell and given Adobe's previous track record I'm not going to hold my breath. 

I owned one of the first real multi-processor "Macs" (it wasn't actually made by Apple) ... a Daystar Genesis MP600 -- with 4 x 150Mhz PPC 604 processors. Back then it actually came with a system extension (on floppy!) and a matching plugin for photoshop that allowed a (very) few plugins to use multiple cores. That was around the Photoshop 5 era or so ... sadly the plugin didn't really make that much of a difference unless you were doing a HUGE gaussian blur


----------



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

Oooooo, a Daystar! :love2:

I was in the wanna be crowd then. I recall reading about the special plugins that were MP aware.

At the time I had a Power Computing PCP240 & it ran PS5 not too bad, really. Later on I purchased a used Mac 9500/180MP to play with & network with the PCP240. Still have both of them, haven't fired them up in years.

Really time to clean out the basement...


----------



## Guest (Mar 23, 2011)

FeXL said:


> Oooooo, a Daystar! :love2:
> 
> I was in the wanna be crowd then. I recall reading about the special plugins that were MP aware.
> 
> ...


I did the big purge a few years back when I moved to the new house ... got rid of almost all of my older mac collection and it was pretty huge, including several MP PowerPC machines (the MP600 and a pair of 7300's that I put dual 604e 180 cards into). Also had a prototype G4 based workstation (non-apple) that never made it to market (in that incarnation) that I was doing Linux porting for. Super super rare those ones, I think there were only about 50 of them total worldwide and they were initially designed to run an Amiga OS clone... it was called the Pegasos and made by Genesi/bplan and the Amiga OS clone was called MorphOS. I actually helped to identify the bug in their Northbridge chip which lead to required hardware fixes  (maybe that's why they didn't send me a newer one afterwards LOL). I also was the first person to get the quad PPC machine (the MP600) to boot with all procs running in linux (with much help from others!)

I think my buddy in Ottawa that I gave those machines to is still running one of the 7300's with the dual 180's as his webserver. It probably hasn't been rebooted in years knowing him. At one point a couple of years ago I asked him about that machine and it took him a couple of minutes to remember it, and then he said "Oh ya! That's what my web server is running on, I totally forgot about that machine!" At that point it hadn't been rebooted in a long, long time.


----------



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

mguertin said:


> I think my buddy in Ottawa that I gave those machines to is still running one of the 7300's with the dual 180's as his webserver. It probably hasn't been rebooted in years knowing him. At one point a couple of years ago I asked him about that machine and it took him a couple of minutes to remember it, and then he said "Oh ya! That's what my web server is running on, I totally forgot about that machine!" At that point it hadn't been rebooted in a long, long time.


ROTFLMAO! 

May be a job for the 9500. Hmmm... 

Also have a couple of pizza box 6100's lying around here somewhere. They were just the perfect height to put a monitor up on.

Speaking of the 9500, I just remembered that I'd installed an Orange Micro PC card with Windoze 95 in it. Picked it up cheap on eBay & decided to play with it a bit. I recall having a single piece of software that I used on it, but can't recall what it was. 

Seems I had a lot more time for playing around back then...


----------



## Nick (Aug 24, 2002)

mguertin said:


> Adobe would probably have to rewrite photoshop from the ground up to get anywhere near that kind of utilization of 4+ cores.


Good. They should rewrite it.
And at the same time they can get rid of all the bloat.

Adobe need a smack on the head. The only way they have to make money is to release a "new version" of their software. They add crap & bloat, but the majority of the core functionality has been there for years. 
New? Hardly. 
And the price? Far to much.

It's about time a company steps up and starts to compete with Adobe.
Just like RED did with the video. The industry needed a good smack in the head.

Pixelmator is a step in the right direction, but it's not quite there yet (no CMYK etc..).


----------



## Guest (Mar 24, 2011)

Nick said:


> It's about time a company steps up and starts to compete with Adobe.
> Just like RED did with the video. The industry needed a good smack in the head.
> 
> Pixelmator is a step in the right direction, but it's not quite there yet (no CMYK etc..).


The problem is it's like Word in the word processor world ... it's the 900lb gorilla and no one can really grab much traction. As far as Pixelmator it's nowhere close to the ballpark that Photoshop plays in. I've heard people say the same thing about GIMP for years and it's the same thing. Yes they are all image editing apps, but that's about where the similarity ends. Photoshop is used for a lot more things than basic image editing.

Now that said, I don't disagree that Photoshop is bloated and massively overpriced and a rewrite would be welcome, but again I'm not going to hold my breath. As far as the bloat, I don't think I can recall ever seeing a company remove features from software -- and maybe this is where the root of the problem lies. It's like a snowball rolling down a hill ... gets bigger and nastier as it goes .. but when it hits the bottom it's going to make a big mess.


----------



## Nick (Aug 24, 2002)

mguertin said:


> The problem is it's like Word in the word processor world ... it's the 900lb gorilla and no one can really grab much traction.


I know what you mean, and it is hard, but it is possible. 
The same could of been said with many long standing giants.



mguertin said:


> Photoshop is used for a lot more things than basic image editing.


Not Adobes fault, but they do enable it.
Photoshop is an image editing program, not layout or design.
We both know this, I just wish others did. 



mguertin said:


> I don't think I can recall ever seeing a company remove features from software -- and maybe this is where the root of the problem lies. It's like a snowball rolling down a hill ... gets bigger and nastier as it goes .. but when it hits the bottom it's going to make a big mess.


Very true. They create problems for themselves. "Yes" is a dangerous word.
Sooner or later something's gotta give.



It's sad actually, because as a whole it's pretty good. 
They just need to do some pruning and steering and bring it back. Focus on the basics.


----------



## eMacMan (Nov 27, 2006)

Even PhotoShop Elements is terribly bloated. Downloaded a trial version of Elements 6 when it came out. A full Gig. Then it was so slow on my older PPC computer, I reverted to version 4.

Version 1 is still my favourite even though it lacks a couple of features that showed up in 2. Sadly it will run only in OS 9 and my main computer will no boot into 9.


----------



## lightbulb (Oct 24, 2005)

Capture One 6 by Phase One makes full use of all cores. Default capture and processing software for the Phase One digital backs and now Leaf, which it bought last year. Supports most pro and semi-pro dslr makes.


----------



## Guest (Mar 24, 2011)

Nick said:


> Not Adobes fault, but they do enable it.
> Photoshop is an image editing program, not layout or design.
> We both know this, I just wish others did.


I wasn't really thinking along those lines, but more along the lines of other things in the professional imaging realm such as a tool for soft-proofing, colour conversions, colour separations, trapping, direct output to film (yes some people still use film), "print to video" (yes this still gets used as well), image capturing (twain and other scanning), capturing/converting photographs (RAW and other proprietary formats), who knows how many plugins, batch image processing, recording and re-using actions, etc. These things are all pretty much above and beyond the actual "image editing" parts of the application and when people compare apps like Pixelmater and GIMP to Photoshop these are some of the big standouts that these other image editor apps don't generally do but very many are needed in a professional workflow.


----------

