Adobe CS6 ready to buy on 7th May
by Ivan

Scanning Adobe’s sites for official launch dates is a bit like searching for the vegetarian special in Gaucho’s. While there might be one, you’re unlikely to find it.

Similarly, when you search the online stores for CS6 Master Collection etc, then it’s an equally thankless task. Thankfully, Tecnobitsis a little sharper than your average cookie cutter.

Moving from one version of Adobe’s amazing products to the next, does not always change your life.

That said, if you go back a few versions, then the cumulative differences can be quite shocking. CS6 promises some very powerful changes under the bonnet – some of which will positively impact at least a third of the people reading this article.

Despite working closely with Intel for years, it’s only been a recent thing that Adobe products have incorporated genuine benefits for multi-CPU systems. Similarly, despite the fact that AMD ships a lot of graphic cards, most of the ‘OK, let’s use the GPU as well as the CPU to make things quicker’ trickery was reserved for nVidia.

In a conversation with a journalist from Future, we raised an eyebrow when he said that with Adobe performance, it was “important to have plenty of CUDA cores”. While it might not smack of a 100% independent opinion, he wasn’t wrong. While AMD (then ATI) was firmly in bed with the Stanford team on GPGPU, nVidia seems to have had more success in getting new initiatives implemented into actual products. That appears to be changing with CS6.

According to the latest blog by Andrew Baum on the AMD.com web site, then if you’re a video editing geek “…it doesn’t get any better than the upcoming release of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6″.

Baum is clear about what floats his boat/duck/sponge, it’s “…the newly enhanced Adobe Mercury Playback Engine that incorporates OpenCL heterogeneous compute for the very first time”. This will blow your mind because, apparently, it will be “…taking advantage of untapped resources, i.e. the GPU, for parallel compute across a number of applications from gaming and medical software, and now with specific functions like processing effects and transitions when video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6″.

This Andrew Baum character is not alone. His opinion seems to be backed up by Bill Roberts who is the Director of Video Product Management for Adobe. Among other things, Roberts has been quoted as saying, “AMD has been a vital partner in helping Adobe bring GPU-acceleration through OpenCL”.

“We’re definitely looking forward to continuing our work with AMD on future enhancements to Adobe Premiere Pro”, he added without prompting.

So the new programs look like they will cut through tasks faster than ever before – if you have the right graphics card set up – but what about that launch date?

Checking for the Adobe version of After Effects on ‘a certain online retailer’s site’, we managed to capture this image. Which, you be honest, might not be worth 1,000 words – but it certainly puts a specific date on the purchase date. Bottom right hand corner in case you’re not sure/extra dry. Click the pic if you want to be extra sure and dry.

Launch date confirmed and an ecstatic Andrew Baum struggles to control his enthusiasm about the GPGPU bits

Comment below or in the Tecnobitsforums.