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DMN: Will the applications that exist today, for example, Photoshop, will they be able to use 8GB of memory if it's a 32-bit app? I guess not, right?Rubinstein: Right. No, it would use up to 4GB per process.
DMN: Have you negotiated with Adobe? Are they planning on doing this optimization any time soon, and if so, what is the timetable?
Rubinstein: Adobe has already done it. They demonstrated it on stage today. They've taken advantage of the capabilities of the G5. Their plug-ins, whatever it is that they use, will ship in August with the machine.
DMN: What other companies have already optimized for 64-bit and will be able to use this 8 gigs of memory? A lot of them or are there just a few?
Rubinstein: The whole point of announcing this machine at today's developer conference was to get everybody in line with what our new direction is, what our new tools are and all that, and we expect that to happen very quickly. That's why we gave them all developer releases today. There is a handful of companies we worked closely with prior to release, but the bulk of them are getting going as of right now.
DMN: So you have Adobe on board, Mathematica -- the ones you mentioned earlier are the ones that got in on this with NDAs earlier.
Rubinstein: Right. Luxology, EMagic, which is our guys -- we showed a video from Pixar, saying they're running RenderMan, this is the fastest desktop machine they have ever seen. I think anyone who jumps on this machine and goes through a little bit of effort -- the Luxology guys are saying they used Apple's tools to develop their application to begin with, and that the port to the G5 took 15 minutes, and 12 of those minutes were just moving the data file over. Three minutes to compile.
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DMN: Really, what you're saying -- I want to make sure I understand this -- is that optimizing for 64-bit is really not very complicated at all, right?
Rubinstein: Well, it depends on what level you go to optimizing you applications. There's a variety of levels, so I don't want to make it that simple. It can be but it isn't necessarily. It's really application-dependent.
DMN: What sort of reaction did you get from the developers? What was their general feeling about this?
Rubinstein: They went nuts. [Laughs] They brought the hall down. Just one feature after another. The gigahertz front-side bus, the G5 processor, the memory capability. I mean, you think about the memory capability -- that means that you can move a DVD's worth of data in less than a second. The digital I/O for the music, for sound, they're really jazzed about that. So there is a bunch of features that they're really pleased with. Of course, us having the latest graphics from ATI and NVidia is really important as well.
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