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I recently dumped Mac (and Adobe) for Windows/Affinity and spent big money on a HP Z840 with 2 x Xeon 2.1GHz processors each with 8 cores and 16 multi-threaded cores, (totalling 32 CPU cores running as 2.1GHz) 32GB RAM, Nvidea GTX 1080i Video Card, running on an ultra fast HP SSD (3000MB/s read speed/2000MB/s write speed). A friend came over today and we compared speed of Affinity Photo opening a very large PSD file, and saving a JPEG of that file. He had his 4 year old Macbook Pro running an old 4 core i7 at 2.6GHz, with 8 multi-threaded cores. The result was embarrassing.....His old laptop opened the 8GB file much quicker than my machine which has more cores and a way faster SSD. Saving the JPEG file was also much faster on the Mac. What I noticed was that the windows machine uses only a single core for the opening of a file, and only one core for the saving of the file, whereas the Mac used four cores. Why? We then compared the speed when doing a gausian blur on the file, we started both at the same time and all 32 cores on my Windows machine ran at 100% and the progress bar flew to the end and sat there doing seemingly nothing, (just when I thought it was going to annihilate the Mac) but I noticed it then switched back to using a single core to do what exactly I do not know, but it allowed the old Mac to catch up, making the time difference minimal. The Mac was using all 8 cores for this process. So, my question is, WHY is the Windows version seemingly limited to single core for certain tasks, making it's performance hobbled on a machine like the Z840? My preference for ANYTHING I do is to have the app I am working in making full use of all resources on my machine and Affinity is not doing that at all times, yet you allow it on Mac, makes no sense....what am I missing?

I know several of the staff at Serif are using the Surface Pro 4 tablet. I am looking to buy either the I5 or I7 model with 8 GB Ram having just returned the Wacom Mobilestudio Pro 13 that I bought before Christmas. For use with Affinity Photo, is there a noticeable performance difference between the I5 and I7 when using Affinity Photo with multilayered files. Some of my Photoshop PSD files are over 1 GB in size Many thanks