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September 3, 2006

intel_macs

Do we count on Rosetta too much?

Posted Sep. 3, ’06, 3:34 PM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Hardware » Intel Macs

Rosetta I’ll admit that I’m pretty satisfied with the performance of my PowerPC applications on my Mac Pro (though I’m less excited about the RAM usage). Right now I’m only using it for Office (still v.X, I never found anything in 2004 that important). For more intensive apps, can we trust Rosetta?

According to SPSS, we can’t.

Please note: SPSS does not support the use of any existing version of SPSS for Mac OS X on the new Intel®-based Mac hardware, including SPSS 11.x or 13.0. The use of the Rosetta emulation software interferes with the numerical calculations in SPSS. We therefore are unable to support any version of SPSS on Intel-based Macintosh machines.

While that’s not a big problem for many applications, what about things like Photoshop? Are we getting the same level of precision? I don’t do anything “mission critical” with Rosetta. Do any of you that do feel safe?

[via MacFixIt]


5 Comments

Dillon K. said:

I feel safe... but then again the only rosetta app I've used is PowerPoint '04...

September 3, 2006 3:40 PM
Ward Author Profile Page said:

I call shennanigans on that one. They just don't want to support it.

September 3, 2006 5:02 PM
Dan--the man said:

So this is a big decision for me. I'm glad this was posted. If I get a MBP next week, should I bother getting the Web Design package (which is CS2 and Studio 8 bundled for $500 academic), or is performace too poor and I should wait for CS3? Any advice would be geatly appreciated.

September 3, 2006 5:26 PM
Fletcher said:

InDesign CS2 through Rosetta has issues with numeric calculations. Some values that would normally be calculated as integer values are instead displayed as long decimal values. For example, the auto-leading for 13 pt type is not 16 pt, but 15.5995995995996 pt.

This discrepency seems mainly cosmetic for a page design application, but I can see how the underlying cause could signal real problems for a financial or scientfic application.

Performance, however, is excellent. The performance of InDesign CS2 is much better on my MacBook Pro than it ever was on my PowerBook G4. I think launch time is a bit slower, but once it is running I have no complaints at all.

I would suggest investing in as much RAM as your machine can accept. My MacBook Pro routinely uses all of its 2 GB of RAM particularly when I am using PowerPC applications.

September 3, 2006 8:42 PM
pdkoenig Author Profile Page said:

I second the calling shenanigans. SPSS has a history lately of major OS upgrades causing SPSS to fail to launch and needing to wait several months for a patch to come. Looking at how those tech specs for SPSS require Java, it's probably just the known issue of PowerPC code being unable to call Java in Rosetta.

To put things in perspective, Wolfram's report on testing Mathematica in Rosetta only had a problem with their J/Link libraries for calling Java. (And they already have a Universal version out.)

September 3, 2006 9:32 PM

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