As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases @AMAZON
MacBook Pro i7 Performance with Photoshop CS4
This page analyzes Photoshop CS4 performance.
See the system configuration notes.
Test — open uncompressed 3.37GB TIF file
Reboot machine, double-click TIF file, time to fully drawn the image on screen.

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.

Photoshop CS4 — diglloydSpeed1
Photoshop test suite that is mostly in memory (Photoshop does a modest amount of writing to its scratch volume).

Photoshop CS4 — diglloydMedium
Photoshop test suite that exceeds available memory (15.7GB scratch).
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.

Photoshop CS4 — diglloydHuge
Photoshop test suite that greatly exceeds available memory (56GB scratch).
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.

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.