Is editing faster on 4 vs 2 cores?

[Christopher]

I don't think so.

http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-se...-quad-core.html

You certainly don't. I upgraded from 8 cores to 12 one one workstation and on my personal computer from 2 to 4 without any problems.

[Mark D Segal]

Following up on Eric's expert advice on how the application is actually programmed to work on the image, there is a subsidiary question I'm not too clear on about the role of hard drives. My understanding is that they don't affect image editing unless recourse to the scratch disk is required because of inadequate physical and virtual RAM, because the image is called-up into RAM for editing. But the hard drives do come into play for calling-up the image in the first place and then re-saving it. I find with my dual core 3 GHz Xeon 5160s that these processes are not fast. Opening an image upwards of 120 MB and resaving it takes enough time to call-up Photoshop's "Progress" bars - never a good sign of computing efficiency. For my Phase-1 files, there's time for coffee or relief therefrom   So I'm hoping that an upgrade to a 4 or 8 core system (probably a Mac this time) would improve file movement to a very noticeable extent, along with other tasks.

[madmanchan]

Hi Mark, moving up to a faster drive should help you, because the base (and edited) images themselves are large in your case. So even if you have plenty of RAM and plenty of cores, you're likely limited by how fast you can read the darn file off the disk (and write it back to the disk).

[Mark D Segal]

Hi Mark, moving up to a faster drive should help you, because the base (and edited) images themselves are large in your case. So even if you have plenty of RAM and plenty of cores, you're likely limited by how fast you can read the darn file off the disk (and write it back to the disk).

Thanks Eric, good point. If I wait long enough maybe I'll be able to get good SSDs in a high-powered desktop. That should be awesome.

[Per Zangenberg]

Ok, so I got my Q9650 installed and made a 20min. video about Lightroom performance with Core 2 Duo vs Quad Core at same clock speed.

I was actually surprised at how well Lightroom uses the quad core...

VIDEO: http://www.vimeo.com/11378426