Community Matters

No, this won’t be a real benchmark comparing my PowerMac G5 Dual Core 2.0GHz with my brand new Mac Pro 8-core 2.8GHz. I haven’t spent the time to create hard numbers. But I can give you some subjective impressions.

First, things that are I/O bound are still as slow as they were. Like reading eight gigabytes of photos from the SanDisk Extreme FireWire 800 reader. Or transferring 200+ gigabytes of data from one disk to another. Not surprising, but still… darn.

Second, and much more important – Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS3 just fly on the new box. Especially compute intensive operations that mostly happen in memory (sync the settings of 25 pictures Lightroom; apply filters in Photoshop) – you suddenly see all eight cores busy in MenuMeters and things that took several seconds on the PowerMac are done instantaneously.

Nice – I will post more comparisons later. Promise.