Apple 8 Cores Released: any help for 2D work in PS

[Schewe]

Photoshop suffers from three main bottlenecks; CPU speed, memory and hard drive speed. Working on only one bottleneck won't be able to speed up Photoshop unless you also address the remaining bottlenecks at the same time.

Yes, Photoshop can use multi-CPU's has been since version 3.0. Problem is that when you double the processors, you don't get double the performance...you get maybe 1.5-1.6X for each additional processor and that is mitigated even more when processors have to share memory as current multiple dual cores or quad cores are involved. Will Photoshop take advantage of all 8 cores in the new Mac Pro? Yes...but it ain't gonna be 8x the speed.

The other thing is we are STILL memory limited by both OS's...Mac Leopard will help as did Vista 64 bit...but not enough yet to make Adobe feel compelled to do the enormous work for relatively little benefit. But even if an app can't take advantage of over 4 gigs...Photoshop DOES speed up considerably (both platforms) when you have 6 gigs or more...why? Cause the OS can use all the rest and that means less page-outs...every other CPU task besides Photoshop uses and needs ram...so more ram is still better even if Photoshop can't access it directly.

Then you get to hard drive speed...the current dual quad core can have 4 SATA II drives...and each SATA port is its own port so you can array 3 drives to be stripped (it's unclear yet if you can boot off an arrayed partition-X-serve can, the G5's couldn't so I don't know if you could do a 4 drive stripped array). Up to a point past 4 drives you run into the same general issues you run into with multiple CPUs...the speed increase falls off.

But, get one of the new dual/dual or dual/quad cores, put in 8 gigs of ram and array at least 2 drives for scratch and you will have a smoking' fast Photoshop machine...Will they get faster? Yes...but a dual/quad core with enough ram and fast drives will run as fast as you can, at the moment.

[BernardLanguillier]

Thanks for the summary Jeff, very interesting. That's exactly where I was heading actually.

Regards,
Bernard

[tomholland]

http://www.barefeats.com/octopro1.html

[61Dynamic]

Those tests with PS and Aperture aren't too surprising. I was hoping for more of a boost---maybe 10-12%---but about 3-8% is sucky for a $1500 expense. Should be interesting to see if these numbers are confirmed by other sources.

P.S. Those tests illustrate quite well how synthetic performance benchmarks died the day multi-core systems became the norm. Only real-world tests can be depended on anymore.

[BernardLanguillier]

Yes, I really think that the value, if any, has to be found when using several CPU hungry applications at the same time, which we all somehow do after coming back from a shoot.

Regards,
Bernard

[cogden]

Barefeats has published three 8-core reports. While the reports are early, and thus aren't as detailed as normal, it appears to confirm my research that the 8-cores doesn't help PS CS3 much, most likely, as John Nack of Adobe has said, because of the memory bottlenecks at a processor level, let alone core level.

3D GAMING: 8 Core versus 4 Core Mac Pro   http://barefeats.com/octopro2.html
" An 8 Core Mac Pro is no faster than a 4 Core Mac Pro when it comes to 3D Gaming. That's"

 8 Core Mac Pro versus  4 Core Mac Pro http://barefeats.com/octopro1.html

Initial Analysis: http://barefeats.com/octopro.html

The biggest real-world advantage so far seems to be in the simultaneous exporting of QuickTime movies.
   The gains with a single QuickTime Export and and single iDVD Video Asset Encode were non-existent. but simultaneously exported all six copies to iPod movie format. The 8 core completed the task 38% faster than the 4 core Mac Pro



Net-net: today, looks like it's better to spend the extra $'s on more RAM and/or striped scratch/boot/app drives (which we'll be configuring and testing soon).

[MikeMike]

There's a new version of Final Cut Studio out and if you look at the videos they talk about RED's new 4K camera. I bet that sucks up a lot of processor power.

Mike