Originally Posted by
PTravel
Good point. It's a huge difference now for computation-intense programs. I make regular use of Photoshop and Premiere, as well as Adobe Audition for sound recording, editing and mixing. All of these programs have to render their output and the difference running on quad-core machines, versus single-core, is beyond dramatic.
I'd imagine many tasks with those programs scale almost linearly with the number of cores; it certainly does with most the open-source video software I use. (I actually use Photoshop a lot, but rather shallowly; it was fast enough for the way I use in on my 2006-vintage dual core laptop.)
Hyperthreading doesn't improve performance as much as doubling the number of real cores does, but for heavily parallelizable tasks the speed improvement can be pretty dramatic by other standards -- around 35% faster doing x264 encoding, give or take, on an i5 dual core compared to hyperthreading turned off, and some of the DB workloads at work have seen larger improvements than that.