VW 12 and Intel Macs

[wv_vectorworker]

search "mac" and "intel" and look for an admin response in a thread. that should give an answer.

[CipesDesign]

If you scroll about halfway down through this thread you will find what you're after...

[domer1322]

thanks ... but ....the thread you listed gave a response from June and said they would update us. I'm looking for the update ... now that it is 5 months later..... and I suspect Apple will announce an Intel machine at Macworld in January .... and I may hold off on VW 12 until Apple's new CPU arrives.

[Hugo]

Intel Macs will be able to run PowerPC software with no problems, thanks to 'Rosetta', a real time decoder that will be included in Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard'. So if at the time Apple ships Intel Macs, Vectorworks (or any other app) is not designed specifically for Intel, that will be no problem.

The question is how fast will Rosetta perform translating PowerPC instructions to Intel. That remains unknown.

[domer1322]

I can't find any mention of VW 12 support for the future new MACs using Intel CPUs. Could Tech support answer: does VW 12 support MAc OS on Intel CPUs? If not (as I suspect), can you state a policy or timeframe for such support of the next release (VW 12.5 or 13?) Also, does VW 12 support use of multiprocessor core CPUs as installed on the current (new) G5 PowerPC chips? Also: some statement on the rendering speed of VW 12 would be nice... even if you just state that it is about the same..... don't leave us guessing and counting on other poster's remarks.

[Pharr]

Hi Domer,

It's not generally our policy to talk about upcoming products, but this is a special situation. I'll try to provide the important info you are looking for. NNA indicated last June that we would support the Intel Macs as soon as we could, and we are planning to have native Intel Mac support around the time of Apple's announced plans to ship (Summer 2006). VectorWorks 12 users will be able to update to our Intel-native version without additional upgrade fees.

Our porting process is less trivial than those being trumpeted on Apple's web site, which seems to have a number along the lines of "It took us only 18 seconds to port to Intel after checking the 'Universal Binary' checkbox. After an additional 8 1/2 minutes of testing, we feel we're ready to ship." ;-) Our porting work for VectorWorks is underway and proceeding according to plan.

With respect to rendering speed, we feel that 12 is generally as fast or faster than 11.0 and in some cases, somewhat faster than 11.5. This is a general statement and does not account for the behavior of all possible render modes or mcd files. We are finalizing some numbers in response to a query on a separate thread and plan to post some example numbers later this week.

I would expect us to perform similarly on a dual core CPU as on a dual processor machine, but we don't have any actual resuts to share.

[alanmac]

Hi Paul

Thanks for letting us know the situation, although I can't see the big concern as an end user right now, as I've been lead to believe the consumer models will be the first in line for introduction in 2006 with the tower models, if they still exist, coming some time later in 2007. By that time VW will be up another version and most will want to upgrade their machines to take full advantage anyway.

Alan

[Christiaan]

quote:

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Originally posted by Pharr:

... we are planning to have native Intel Mac support around the time of Apple's announced plans to ship (Summer 2006). VectorWorks 12 users will be able to update to our Intel-native version without additional upgrade fees ... Our porting work for VectorWorks is underway and proceeding according to plan.

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The more I frequent this forum the more it becomes apparent to me what a great team there is at Nemetschek.

[islandmon]

Agree with Christiaan on the Great Team @ Nemetschek ... there a powerful synergy in this community.