New Computer Purchase

[Colin Red]

Hi there,

I am not a technical person when it comes to purchasing a new computer, so a little help please. I am looking to purchase a new MacBook Pro 15 inch. My choices are for:

one: a 2.6GHz 6-core Processor with Turbo Boost of 4.5 GHz .....  or two: a 2.3GHz 8-core Processor with Turbo Boost of 4.8GHz.

From the specs outlined above one has more GHz while the other has more Cores.

Question then: Will Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher take advantage of the extra cores or the extra GHz.

Affinity, thank you for your amazing products, Adobe is long gone :)  

[firstdefence]

I'd go 8 Cores.

https://create.pro/blog/cores-faster-cpu-clock-speed-explained/

Summary

Quote

More cores, slower clock speed

• Pros
  • Applications that support multi-threading will greatly benefit from having a higher number of cores at their disposal
  • Increasing the number of cores in your CPU is a cost-effective way of increasing performance
  • Multi-threading support for applications will continue to improve over time
  • You will be able to run more apps at once without seeing performance drops
  • Great for running multiple virtual machines

• Cons
  • Lower single-threaded performance than a higher clock speed processor

Fewer cores, higher clock speed

• Pros
  • Better single threaded performance
  • Lower cost option
• Cons
  • Fewer cores to split between applications
  • Not as strong multi-threading performance

 

[Dazzler]

I'd also go 8 cores, I have a 6 core PC and just tested doing something in designer whilst looking at the CPU stats and indeed all cores (12 because of the hyperthreading) were being utilised. So with that being the case, in theory with the 6 core you'll get 15.6 - 27 Ghz total, whilst with the 8 core you'll get 18.4 - 38.4 Ghz total. Of course it doesn't work exactly like that due to the way cores are utilised and managed, but as a guide it's probably good enough to go by.

[Colin Red]

Hi back,

              With all due respect and by the way thank you both. To firstdefence, I read that article also, but it does not answer my question. ....Which is ... " Will Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher take advantage of the extra cores or the extra GHz.".

to Dazzler. I respect your time doing the research on your computer, but still this has not really answered my question.

In fairness the answer to my question should come from one of those who created the apps. 

cheers

[firstdefence]

This is a post @Ben Made just over a year ago, I don't know whether things have changed much.

Quote

Ok - I'm not giving a general answer to this - it's not that straight forward. So, I can speak for the bits I've done.

 

We try to use as many cores as available, depending upon the task.  Whenever something could be parallel processed, then we will have used a threaded segmented approach. So, snapping, for example, will now spawn nested threads to perform calculations.  It starts with a single high level thread, which queues up smaller tasks, and those also can queue sub-tasks. The hope being that as the snapping branches it will perform the smaller tasks in parallel.

 

All the raster stuff will be very parallelised.  @Andy Somerfield is the best person to comment on this.

 

There are some things which have to remain single thread, such as serialisation.  While threads may access stored data, file access (reading and writing) always has to be serial.

UI will also be done on the main thread, but components of UI might be generated in background task threads (such as creating thumbnail images).

 

As far as threading goes - no major task performed in Affinity will be intentionally blocking another major task - they will share available cores, subject to standard thread prioritisation.  That being said, threading is also always limited by shared resource access.  Access to the document data will use critical sections, which will prevent more than one thread accessing resources.  So, some threaded tasks will be forced to yield if they need document data access.

 

[Fixx]

I think the difference between 6 and 8 cores is not very big. Get enough RAM, 16 GB minimum.

[R C-R]

12 hours ago, Colin red said:

With all due respect and by the way thank you both. To firstdefence, I read that article also, but it does not answer my question. ....Which is ... " Will Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher take advantage of the extra cores or the extra GHz.".

If you want a simple answer it should be obvious by now that it is "both" ... but that in reality is it is more complicated than that.

Going with the 8 core model will probably give you the best overall performance.

[Rocketdrive]

In my experience all Affinity products are so damn well optimized for Macs You probably won't notice a difference on _those_ machines. I am just testing the base (13", 1.4 GHz) model MPB and Photo, like Designer, is super responsive with all of my files. In fact, it is much better than the specs on paper imply.

Having said that, either 15" macbook You mentioned should do a stellar job with all Affinity products. Depending on Your needs You might trade more RAM and/or SSD for the fastest multi-core CPU.

[R C-R]

On 10/4/2019 at 10:12 AM, Colin red said:

I am looking to purchase a new MacBook Pro 15 inch. My choices are for:

one: a 2.6GHz 6-core Processor with Turbo Boost of 4.5 GHz .....  or two: a 2.3GHz 8-core Processor with Turbo Boost of 4.8GHz.

If by new you mean one of the "MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019)" models, as the Apple Technical Specifications webpage shows, the base 2.3 GHz version is equipped with an 8-core Intel Core i9 CPU & a Radeon Pro 560X GPU vs. the 2.6 GHz version's 6-core Intel Core i7 CPU & a Radeon Pro 555X GPU, making the 2.3 GHz 8 core model considerably more powerful overall. It also comes with a 512GB SSD, twice the storage capacity of the SSd in the base 2.6 GHz 6 core model. Both base models come with 16 GB of RAM, which should be more than adequate for most Affinity projects.

Of course, the 2.3 GHz 8 core base model is substantially more expensive ($600 more before taxes at US prices) but it definitely would be the better choice if you want the best performance.

[Cecil]

Personally I would wait until October’s announcement of new products.  It may offer a 16” model or reduce the price of the older models in one day.  Not always on Apple, but other outlets.

[Ben]

The short answer is - to improve performance overall, you'll first want more memory and good size (and faster) primary storage.  A faster CPU is also beneficial, but sometimes the higher spec ones won't offer the equivalent performance benefit relative to the price difference.  Generally, you'd want to balance the spec of all three anyway - it'd be pointless having the fastest CPU with the minimum memory.  Annoyingly, the option of upgrading memory later is being hampered in some machines (and often 3rd party memory is a lot cheaper).

We make use of primary storage quite a bit to store bitmap data, and document data, and scratch files for document saving - so a fast hard drive is a must.

Then there's GPU performance...

 

 

[andyajon]

On 10/6/2019 at 7:23 PM, Rocketdrive said:

In my experience all Affinity products are so damn well optimized for Macs You probably won't notice a difference on _those_ machines. I am just testing the base (13", 1.4 GHz) model MPB and Photo, like Designer, is super responsive with all of my files. In fact, it is much better than the specs on paper imply.

Having said that, either 15" macbook You mentioned should do a stellar job with all Affinity products. Depending on Your needs You might trade more RAM and/or SSD for the fastest multi-core CPU.

I’m in the market for a new computer after my MacBook Pro 17” Late 2011 died on me. I’m seriously looking into the MacBook Pro 13” 1.4Ghz base model but planning to upgrade it to 16GB RAM & 1TB SSD. I use all three Affinity: Photo, Designer & Publisher and sometimes use Final Cut Pro. Can you give me more info on the machine’s performance please?