What, like it won't work on XP 64 bit?
Or did somebody forget that it exists...

Instead of using a tiny program like Irfanview, I want to use a 2 gigibyte program that requires a minimum of 4 GB of system memory.

Where did this number come from???

Are you high?

Uhhh. You're dumb.

JasonK, XP is dead or dying from a business POV

4GB of DDR2 is really cheap. Newegg.com lists an A-Data DDR2-800 kit for only 69.99.

Also I hope Adobe is kind enough to toss in some SSE4a love for the Phenom. Phenoms operate best in 64bit environments and a little code optimization will let them shine.

Probably, they're figuring by the time they get it out, noone will be looking to put it on XP. Or, at the very least, they're targeting Vista as the "must" and if they can nail XP, its a bonus.

"4GB exclusive"? For what? I mean seriously, a 600 MB image file would be one heck of a file, with lots of layers, etc. What in the world would 4GB RAM be used for as a requirement? I'm sure someone out there will chime in with "We use umpteen million gigabyte files", but that's hardly a case for the system requirements for the app... if you're doing bigger stuff, you get more ram, sure. But if you're doing a more normal(these days) 10 megapixel file with a few layers thrown in, how much would you really need?

Call me skeptical...

"At least initially, the high-end product will only be available for Vista owners because the programming language it's using, Carbon, is not perfectly compatible with Mac computers."

If I were to interpret this at face value, this is what I'd think:

Adobe programs Photoshop CS in some esoteric programming language called "Carbon" which is only compatible with Vista64 and not OSX ?

Obviously, that's not the case. I assume Photoshop is mostly written in C , probably with some C, javascript, etc thrown in.

If that statement is somehow referring to the ancient OSX API called "Carbon", it sure doesn't make any sense either, as obviously carbon is ONLY compatible with OSX and isn't even related in any way to Windows.

Are they trying to say OSX won't see a 64-bit Photoshop because Adobe actually programs Photoshop against the Carbon API? That would be psychotic.. it can't be the case.

Tgdaily! WTF?

"10 megapixel file with a few layers thrown in, how much would you really need?"

Remember that when you're editing a file, the computer uncompresses the file, so a 10Mpixel 6.6MB JPEG ends up turning into an almost 30MB file in memory. Then you have image scaling to fit a ~3600x2600 pixel file onto a typical 1280x1024 screen. Of course, if you're using typical software, your CPU is processing that frame buffer without the help of the texture unit on your graphics card, so it's a fair amount of data to crunch in realtime (Remember the last time you played a game with only software 3D? I didn't think so.). Meanwhile, if you're using transparency, you're automatically using an extra 25% for the 8 transparency bits in RGBA colour space (not to mention that CMYK w/ transparency uses even more storage). If you're editing with, say, 10 layers, your memory requirements go up by an equal amount. Layer effects in Photoshop also increase file size dramatically.

Let's just say that I used to to work with images that were close to 10000x10000 pixels for very high DPI printing (and flawless scaling), and a 200MB file with multiple layers actually took up over 900MB of RAM once loaded - Photoshop shows you the actual file size vs. the "editing size" (RAM usage for the file itself) in the status bar in older versions. That was 8 years ago on a Windows 98 machine with 128MB of RAM running Photoshop 6, where most edits were performed in the Windows swap file. :P

It wasn't pretty.

Requiring 4GB of RAM makes sense in this situation - the key pillar of 64-bit computing is RAM increases beyond 4GB anyway.

They are try to get away from all the awesome free image editing programs, like Paint.Net and Gimp. CS4 will be for $5000 machines in a year or so, so 4G of Ram isn't that much. :)

Off topic, but where's their 64-bit Flash Player? Their site has said its being developed for eons. Anyone know anything?