Is there going to have Corel X4 in 64 Bits?
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 that was announced last week is a 32bit application. It has been tested fully on Windows XP and Windows Vista 64 bit. There has been no announcement regarding a 64-bit version of CorelDRAW.
Gérard
will be there a 64 bits version?
They must have said the same thing going from 16-bit to 32-bit... once they do it, within the next generation it will (I believe) mean a performance boost for everyone (if there isn't a performance advantage from going 64-bit, why has Intel designed their CPUs all 64-bit capeable now instead of leaving them at 32-bit?)
A real chicken or the egg problem with 4 things that need to come at the same time for the user: CPUs (which we've had for 3-4 years now) OS (XP 64-bit wasn't advertised very much, but there seems to be more adoption of Vista 64-bit where people are building powerful machines and want more than 4 GB of memory; maybe it will be the next OS though that really takes off...) Software (not really any yet; even the adobe apps, photoshop and indesign, are't 64-bit yet, are they?) and Drivers (again not available yet as you say for many RIPs, printers, etc.)
I imagine the driver people are saying the same thing -- why provide printer or scanner drivers until people are running it. And people can't run it until the drivers exist and the software exists. A tricky one, since there will have to be overlap between 32-bit and 64-bit versions since not everyone will be able to upgrade their OS at once, and yet I would guess, everyone will at some point in the future.
Since I don't have EFI Fiery drivers avaialble for 64-bit yet, I'm actually glad that Corel didn't spend the resources to do X4 as 64-bit.And it's pretty darn fast on my new CPU as-is.
But in two more years when I presume X5 will come out, I can't help but wonder if X5 shouldn't have a 64-bit version. Carrying around a camrea with 8 GB of memory now and who knows what then, and even now with a motherboard with 6 of 8 memory slots open, 64 GB capeable but only able to utilize 4 GB due to the 32-bit os limitation, will I still be happy in two years using only a fraction of the resources available?
I imagine two years from now I'll want to have a lot more things go from "fast" to "instant." Instead of a printer spool on disk to spool out a 500 MB print job it will go instantly to a ram drive. WIth 16 or 32 GB of memory, every corel file I'll work on in a day could be cached for not only quick but instant access for either opening or saving (with the file saved to disk in the background).
For this 32-bit system I just spent the big bucks for an 8-drive raid-10 system which works awesome (I can save a 2 GB corel file in 40 seconds now that used to take over 5 minutes on my previous system) but I think system RAM will be more versitile and less expensive to accomplish even faster responiveness two years down the road.
There was a good reason to move from 16 bits to 32 bits. It vastly improved speed, added resolution, made it easier to manage memory, and so much more. There wouldn't be that much difference going to 64 bits. CorelDraw doesn't need any extra resolution for 64-bitness to help. I can't think of any ways that having larger memory space or objects would make CorelDraw run any faster or work any better.
There are some downsides to using 64 bits, BTW. The extra bits mean that you have to use 2x as much memory to store a single number or CPU instruction. The only time going to extra bitness helps is when you need more resolution or larger chunks of memory than what can be defined by a 32-bit word, so the code has to break the elements down into smaller 32-bit chunks and merge the results together. If moving to a larger word size eliminates all of this extra work, only then does it make the code faster. Otherwise, the extra memory 64-bitness requires would actually slow things down.
64-bitness helps with really huge databases, like for example Google's database - nothing you and I are going to have on our computers any time in the next 10 years - and with 3D calculations. It doesn't do that much for something like CorelDraw.
If you are running a 64-bit OS, you already get an advantage in memory management handled by Windows itself, even running 32-bit apps.
While CorelDraw 6.0 wasn't very stable when it was first released, there were people (like me) that needed the 32-bitness really bad. I was using CorelDraw to make illustrations that were bringing Draw 5.0 to its knees. I had to import CAD drawings with several thousand nodes for simplification into assembly drawings, and Draw 5.0 would just crash. CorelDraw 6.0 could handle these fairly easily, probably because the 32-bit address space eliminated memory segmentation.
Version 6.0 also added vitally needed scripting for the project I did at that time.
So I put up with the flakey behavior. Version 5.0 was a very refined release of the original code base, but version 6.0 ran about 4x faster on large drawings. It also had vastly superior resolution.
Nothing on Win9x was very stable at the time BTW. Winword crashed just about as often as CorelDraw did.
There were earlier versions of Draw were pretty lame too. Versions 3 & 4 were slow and very buggy. I stuck with version 2.0 until 5.0 came out. I bought each of the upgrades, but stuck with 2.0 because it ran better than the 3 & 4.
I'd love to see X5 be a true 64 bit application.