DualCore or QuadCore for Gimp?
On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 00:55 +0100, Uwe Haider wrote:
Runs Gimp with a quadcore or with an faster DualCore better? The system
will run on Linux Gentoo with 64bit.
Not sure it matters unless you happen to run a lot of other applications
at the same time. GIMP doesn't (to my knowledge) parallelize operations
on multiple cores. So the kernel gets to decide which core to run on
and GIMP only runs on one core at a time (though it can get swapped
around during the life of the process). The others get assigned to
other processes. Not sure if the gcc compiler provides options for
parallelizing operations, which would probably be the only way GIMP
would use more than one core at a time. If this is accurate then you
*might* actually better off with the faster dual core if you don't run
alot of other applications at the same time as GIMP. But the processor
probably isn't your bottleneck.
What will matter more is lots of really fast memory. GIMP is memory
hungry. Having lots of it that is very fast will improve the perceived
user experience, especially with very large images that have many
layers.
Quad-cores tend to support the newer, faster memory better. Dual-cores
are typically considered slightly lower end processors for the chip
makers and so tend to be paired with slower memory, though that's not a
hard and fast rule. Consider that a chip maker benefits from your
purchase of the higher end chip, so anything that makes the lower end
chip seem less spunky works in their favor (well, mostly).
