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Real world difference between dual-core 13" rMBP and my quad-core iMac

PatriotInvasion

PatriotInvasion

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 18, 2010
1,645
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Boston, MA
So, I went ahead and bought the 13" rMBP upon it's introduction last October, selling my mid-2010 27" iMac in the process.

The iMac had a 2.8 GHz QUAD-core i5, 4GB of RAM, and a 1TB HDD. And of course, my base 13" rMBP has a 2.5 GHz DUAL-core i5, 8GB of RAM, and the 128GB SSD.

While the 8GB of RAM and SSD are upgrades, I think I finally noticed the processor downgrade when encoding a movie in iMovie last night. My question is whether or not a 2010 quad-core i5 chip is THAT much more powerful than the dual-core i5 in my rMBP to the point where the time difference of encoding a video would be significantly noticeable? Thoughts?
 
Encoding will be done faster on the computer with the fastest CPU (in terms of clock and architecture efficiency) and fastest HDD (reading and writing does take its time).
 
PatriotInvasion said:
So, I went ahead and bought the 13" rMBP upon it's introduction last October, selling my mid-2010 27" iMac in the process.

The iMac had a 2.8 GHz QUAD-core i5, 4GB of RAM, and a 1TB HDD. And of course, my base 13" rMBP has a 2.5 GHz DUAL-core i5, 8GB of RAM, and the 128GB SSD.

While the 8GB of RAM and SSD are upgrades, I think I finally noticed the processor downgrade when encoding a movie in iMovie last night. My question is whether or not a 2010 quad-core i5 chip is THAT much more powerful than the dual-core i5 in my rMBP to the point where the time difference of encoding a video would be significantly noticeable? Thoughts?
Click to expand...

If it uses all 4 cores, encoding will show a difference.
 
So safe to say that for most tasks, the 8GB of RAM and SSD of the rMBP are an upgrade over my old iMac, but when it comes to encoding video, the quad-core chip of the iMac would be missed even though it was 2 1/2 year old chip model?
 
Like I said, depends. If the application is able to do the multi threaded deal, then yes, a Quad core will win over the dual core. But if the application is not multi thread optimized, then you wont see much difference but the inherent architectural and clock improvements in performance.
 
jav6454 said:
Like I said, depends. If the application is able to do the multi threaded deal, then yes, a Quad core will win over the dual core. But if the application is not multi thread optimized, then you wont see much difference but the inherent architectural and clock improvements in performance.
Click to expand...

Well as mentioned, the application I noticed a speed difference in was iMovie '11, which I'm guessing takes advantage of all available cores correct?
 
PatriotInvasion said:
Well as mentioned, the application I noticed a speed difference in was iMovie '11, which I'm guessing takes advantage of all available cores correct?
Click to expand...

Watch Activity Monitor while you're processing and see if all 4 cores get pegged.
 
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