MacBook Pro i7 Performance with Photoshop CS4

This page analyzes Photoshop CS4 performance.

See the system configuration notes.

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Test — open uncompressed 3.37GB TIF file

Reboot machine, double-click TIF file, time to fully drawn the image on screen.

This test is dominated by drive speed: the fast solid state drives used in the MPG Pro Laptop cut the time to less than half that using the fast hard disk drive (HDD).

Photoshop CS4 times, lower is better

Test — save 3.37GB PSD file as 2.74GB PSB file

This test is dominated by CPU speed, because Photoshop is single-threaded for save. Disk speed has little impact.

This test is dominated by CPU speed, so the hard drive and SSD speed difference is less dramatic. Still, the SSD speed is 14% faster than with the hard drive.

Photoshop CS4 times, lower is better

Photoshop CS4 — diglloydSpeed1

Photoshop test suite that is mostly in memory (Photoshop does a modest amount of writing to its scratch volume).

This test is dominated by CPU speed; the drive is minimally involved. The Core i7 at 2.66GHz is 20% faster than the Core 2 Duo at 2.93GHz.

Photoshop CS4 times, lower is better

Photoshop CS4 — diglloydMedium

Photoshop test suite that exceeds available memory (15.7GB scratch).

This test is dominated by drive speed: the fast solid state drives used in the MPG Pro Laptop cut the time to less than one third that using the fast hard disk drive (HDD).

Even though the exact same hard disk drive (HDD) was used for the Core i7 and Core 2 Duo, the Core i7 comes out ahead. It suggests that SATA performance issues are fixed in the Core i7, improving drive performance.

diglloydMedium Benchmark seconds, lower is better

Photoshop CS4 — diglloydHuge

Photoshop test suite that greatly exceeds available memory (56GB scratch).

This test is dominated by drive speed: the fast solid state drives used in the MPG Pro Laptop cut the time to about 1/4 that using the fast hard disk drive (HDD).

Even though the exact same hard disk drive (HDD) was used for the Core i7 and Core 2 Duo, the Core i7 comes out ahead. It suggests that SATA performance issues are fixed in the Core i7, improving drive performance.

diglloydHuge Benchmark seconds, lower is better

Conclusions

With anything involving the drive significantly, there are whopping performance gains using the MPG Pro Laptop solid state drive setup.

The drive speed gains are all the more impressive since the machines all had the maximum of 8GB memory and the hard disk drive is as fast as you’ll find in a MacBook Pro. Differences between a 5400 rpm drive would be much greater.

What is also interesting however is that the Core i7 seems to do better even when a test is dominated by drives speed. This suggests that the SATA port limitations (bugs?) in the prior MacBook Pro have been addressed.