diglloyd
Mac Performance Guide

OWC Mercury Accelsior PCI Express SSD
Extreme reliability and performance. Delivered.
Our premium upgrade service provides peace of mind.
MPG Photo Workstation MPG Pro Laptop

100% Kona, 100% Family Owned

WindInMyFace.com — Bicycling blog, gear, rides, training, nutrition

Are you a photographer?

Don’t miss all the great articles, news and analysis at

diglloyd.com
diglloyd.com

Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Helicon Focus

Last updated September 05, 2010 - Send Feedback

See test machine configuration.

Helicon Focus does use multiple cores, but not fully. The results show that:

  • The six cores of the 2010 Mac Pro 3.33GHz are 25% faster than 4 cores of the 2009 3.33GHz model.
  • The 12-core Mac Pro is only 15% faster than the 6-core model.

Bottom line is that the 2010 hexacore looks like a great choice here, and that the CPU cores are not fully utilized.

x
RAW-file Processing Speed

CPU core usage

See Monitoring system performance with Activity Monitor. Black areas are idle, red and green are usage.

Helicon Focus makes reasonably good usage of CPU cores, but there is some unused CPU time, which is why only a 25% gain is seen from 4 cores to 6.

CPU core usage with Photoshop CS5
CPU core usage with Helicon Focus
2010 Mac Pro 6-core @ 3.33GHz

Bus-powered Portable Storage

diglloyd Home Page | Terms of Use | Copyright © 2008-2013 diglloyd Inc, all rights reserved. | Contact | Newsletter + Alerts