"Classic" performance on duals

[meta-ghost]

was wondering what sort of performance people are getting out of the "classic" mode with their dual 2 gig (or close) machines. i have an os 9 application (architectural 3d rendering) that i use sparingly (hence not wanting to upgrade just yet) and since i won't be able to boot in os9 i would like to know if the power of the 2 gig helps in classic at all.

 

[Makosuke]

Well, first off, even if you're only using one processor, a dual 2.0 will be faster than anything else, since there aren't any single 2.0 G5s (yet, anyway). Not a whole lot faster than a single 1.8, (10%, according to the numbers), but faster nonetheless.

The longer answer is, sort of. A few classic apps could take advantage of two processors (Photoshop, for example), but they had to be specially written for that, and it was generally limited to very high-end applications. The software you're talking about might fall into that category, but you'd have to check. If it does take advantage of duals, then as far as I know you'll still get a speed boost, even in classic.

In either case, though, the bigger boost will be in everything else; the thing is, even if that app only uses one processor, when it's maxed out doing stuff in Classic you'll still have a whole processor left over for other tasks--e-mail in the background, web surfing while you wait, another lenghty process in OSX grinding away, etc. This is always the biggest advantage of dual processors--even when one is tied up with a process that only uses one processor, the other is still free to do other things.

That's the way I think it works, anyway.