Is there going to have Corel X4 in 64 Bits?
I think the problem with drivers on 64 bit OS is a bit overrated. Yes, the old PCs with old hardware would probably have a problem. But I don't think any modern device would have no 64 bit drivers. I'm running 64 bit OS at work and at home and have no issues with any hardware I have. On XP x64 I did have problem with my old video capture card. I did keep a 32 bit OS for that rare occasion I needed to use it. However after upgrading to Vista x64 even that was taken care of since Vista recognized that piece of... <hardware>.
And don't forget that on x64 CPU there are twice as many general purpose registers and twice as many XMM registers, which means more data can be kept in registers and out of memory which significantly boosts performance. Also x64 CPU all have at least SSE2 instructions. Moving to x64 platform means that SSE2 (at least) will be guaranteed to be there. This could be a big performnce improvement.
And having more than 2GB or RAM available to application is a good enough reason to switch to 64 bit platform. x64 also provides a different (much faster) way of exception handling, so entering/exiting try...catch block will have no impact on performance.
Now, having said that, CorelDRAW is a huge application with a lot of code which has been written long time ago. Making everything compile and work on 64 bit platform would be a significant effort and will take away from developing new features. Is there a market demand to stall development and focus on porting the application to 64 bit platform? Would you buy x64 version of CorelDRAW which has no new features since last release (x86) yet pay the full upgrade price? Most people wouldn't.
I would personally LOVE to see as many native x64 applications on the market as possible as I'm 64 bit freak myself. (By the way, I'm happy to see 64 bit shell extension in CorelDRAW X4). And I would love to have something like Flash plugin for my x64 IE browser but "for some reason" Adobe is not releasing one... I wonder why :)
The background issue here is driver signing being mandatory for 64bits. Here are a few reading that will give you something to think about...
The thrid part in the below is well worth the time...
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/02/VistaKernel/
What Peter Gutmann thinks of (part 3) Vista DRM
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
And in simple terms...
http://apcmag.com/3112/microsoft_cuts_another_feature_full_hd_playback_in_32bit_vista_goes
Does the X5 version be 64-bit? When the corel release version X5?
32 bit OS will go extinc sooner than later...it's enevitable that the imgration from 32 - 64 will happne sooner...there is no need for 32 bits any longer, it would be a nice leap if they jsut by pass 64 and go to 128, 128bit cpus' oh yeah it will happen
128 bits will be a very steep upgrade, because 64 bits can address a very large amount of memory: 16 exabytes, or 16 billion gigabytes.
Saying that some application do not need to be 64 bits isn't only plain dumb, but it's nonsense - how to explain the 2GB limit, on machines that have times this amount of memory? And just with an app to manipulate graphics, specially this dumb Corel that does a lot of virtual memory access on disk??? I serious doubt that the majority of advanced users do not have 64 bits OSes today. For games or Corel applications, 32 bits seems ok, but for serious or professional apps 64 bits rules today. Maybe someday Corel brings professional apps to the market.
ZilonX said: I serious doubt that the majority of advanced users do not have 64 bits OSes today.
At least on Spain and South America, almost nobody uses Windows 64-bits for professional works. Only a few people use it and don't take advantadge for this. Of course, the future is a 128-bits OS and more, but is not the present