PS has had specific dual-processor support built-in for many years now.
In fact, you can, if you pay close attention, see (on the startup
splash) it load the DP support module when it starts up. PS is
significantly faster (in my experience, as well as in benchmarks I've
seen) in DP or DC systems than in single processor or single-core
systems. Enough so that it was worth the cost for me to upgrade to a
dual Xeon system last time I built a new one, and that my old,
dual-Pentium system served me a couple of years longer than would have a
single-processor machine.
Beyond PS, however, I completely agree that most of the run-of-the-mill
off the shelf software benefits little from dual processors--especially
with the ATA disks typically used in home systems. To see benefits in
other aspects than PS from dual processors in home systems, one needs to
configure the entire system to take advantage of them (with things like
a SCSI disk subsystem).
---
Scott Gomez
-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Chuck Norcutt
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 9:11 AM
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [OM] Re: Help! Moron needs computer advice.
I doubt that PWP can make use of that dual core processor and I'm not
sure how effectively PS can use it either. Having a second processor is
always good for running multiple applications simultaneously... assuming
those apps are doing meaningful work for more than a second or two at a
time. However, making use of a second processor within a single
application requires that the programmers wrote the code to allow the
work to be split... something that's not often done.
Assume that PS has to sharpen an image. To make it go faster using both
of those processor cores the programmer has to split the work between
two or more processes or threads of execution. Some extra intelligence
is involved such that the total work can be fairly divvied up between
the mulitiple workers and processing units.
I just doubt that there's any of this sort of thing in PWP given its age
and lack of maintenance and suspect that it might even be rather limited
in PS... but I could be wrong on both counts. Image processing is
exactly the sort of thing that chews up lots of computing resources.
But it also lends itself to being divvied up and distributed so you're
more likely to find it in PS, for example, than many other kinds of
applications.
Even so, if I had the option for a faster processor rather than two
slower ones I'd probably go with fast. The dual processors, in
aggregate, might have more total horsepower but the efficiency of their
use in a home computing environment I think is questionable.
Chuck Norcutt
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