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MPG Table of Contents   Page 1: Mac Pro Westmere Introduction Page 2: Which Mac Pro CPU for Photography, Video, Sound? Page 3: Mac Pro Westmere Clock Speed, Cores, and Cache Page 4: When More Is Less: Photoshop Slower With 12 Cores Than 6 Page 5: Mac Pro Westmere Estimating CPU Performance Page 6: Mac Pro Westmere Hits and Misses Page 7: Mac Pro Westmere Ordering Tips: What to Get and What to Skip Page 8: Mac Pro Westmere Solid State Drive Option Page 9: Mac Pro Westmere How Much Memory and Where to Buy Page 10: Mac Pro Westmere Value Compared to Quad-Core iMac Page 11: Mac Pro Westmere Internal SATA Bandwidth Page 12: Mac Pro Westmere Test Machine Configuration Page 13: Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop Performance: diglloydSpeed1 Page 14: Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop Performance: diglloydMedium Page 15: Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop Performance: diglloydHuge Page 16: Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop CS5 Panorama (Auto Align and Auto Blend) Page 17: Mac Pro Westmere Digital Camera RAW File Processing Speed (Bibble Pro) Page 18: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Import with Adobe Lightroom 3 Page 19: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Import with PhaseONE CaptureONE Page 20: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Import with Apple Aperture 3 Page 21: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Processing with Canon Digital Photo Professional Page 22: Mac Pro Westmere RAW-file Processing with Nikon Capture NX2 Page 23: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with PhotoZoom Pro Page 24: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Helicon Focus Page 25: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with PTGui Pro Page 26: Mac Pro Westmere XCode C++ Build Page 27: Mac Pro Westmere Real World Memory Bandwidth Page 28: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Apple Logic Studio Page 29: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Adobe After Effects Page 30: Mac Pro Westmere Performance with Handbrake Video Encoding Page 31: Mac Pro Westmere Cinebench CPU and GPU Page 32: Mac Pro Westmere Conclusions

Mac Pro Westmere Photoshop Performance: diglloydHuge

Please see Photoshop results for the prior Mac Pro Nehalem here and here and here.

The diglloydHuge benchmark measures core Photoshop operations, generating a huge 56GB scratch size. Even a Mac Pro with 64GB of memory will show some speed impairment.

The amount of memory dominates; the iMac suffers badly from having only 16GB. The machines with 64GB (8 slots) fare much better than the machines with only 4 slots.

Clock speed is a minor factor with huge jobs that are memory limited.

The 6-core Mac Pro beats the 4-core model, but barely.

For huge jobs, get a Mac Pro with eight memory slots, so that you can install 48or 64GB.

With a hard drive, the differences shown here would be much greater; all the machines here used dual 200GB Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSDs in a 400GB RAID-0 stripe for scratch, which is as fast a scratch drive as Photoshop can utilize.

These machines are the MPG Pro Workstation and MPG Pro One (iMac); it doesn’t get any faster.

Click for larger graph.

CPU core usage

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

Very poor use of CPU cores, with about 80% or more of the computing power squandered.

This graph shows 1 iteration on the 8-core 2.93GHz Mac Pro Nehalem with 64GB memory.