On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 08:19:27AM -0700, Tim Bray wrote: > This describes me, and I asked the Internet which one to get. The > Internet said ?Don?t get a new Mac right now, wait a couple months.? > http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/03/27/New-Computer (see > the comments)
I won't comment on the "next month's sytem will be better" advice. But as to the clock rate issues; my current luggable machine has a Core 2 Duo processor (2.4 or 2.8 GHz clock speed, I believe). I'm in the process of moving over to a later model, which has a quad- core i7 processor with a quoted clock speed of 1.6 GHz. While at first sight that looks like a sizeable step back for single-thread programs, that's misleading. The later processers have what Intel refer to as "Turbo Boost". In simple terms this means the system can increase the clock rate under light load conditions, up to roughly double the quoted rate. In my limited experience with the new system I find it quite easy to believe that performance for anything is already better than the old machine. Couple that with the increase from a dual core to a quad-core system (with each core having better hyperthreading capablilities), adressable memory going from 3GB on the old (Windows XP) system to as much as 32GB on the new (Windows 7) one, and a newer nVidia GPU I expect LR4 to run acceptably. It would be nice if Lightroom could make use of the CUDA capabilities of the GPU (I believe that Adobe already make some use of CUDA/OpenCL in other products, but not in Lightroom). -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
