My equipment

I own a Mhackintosh desktop, with 4-core at 3.4Ghz, 8GB RAM, 2×1TB hard-drive in RAID-0 for system, music, photos, 2TB for video storage, GeForce 8800 GTS (CUDA & OpenCL development!), internal Blu-Ray/DVD; I also have a MacBook Pro 17″ dual-core 2.8Ghz, 4GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm hard-drive with GeForce 9400M and GeForce 9600M GT (also CUDA and OpenCL development!).

These are great computers, and there are tasks that are really heavy for my laptop, such as Full-HD video encoding. I just confy them to my desktop under OS X or Windows 7, so my laptop is mainly used with netBeans (Java), MySQL, PHP, Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, and many many open browser windows with FireFox, Safari or Chrome.

Heavy tasks are not the matter…

This is the point, not what is an heavy task, but what slow me when I want to have things done. Full-HD video encoding doesn’t slow me, albeit it’s the heaviest task I do: I put my desktop computer at work during the night, and forget the task, or even in daytime, using my laptop instead. So it’s not a matter of how heavy is a task, it’s more a matter of slowdown I encounter on my work, or how many time a task takes me to be completed.

What is slowing me down on my laptop?

On my day to day use, there’s many software that are slow, many of them because they are mono-threaded, as FireFox or Adobe Photoshop (main tasks are mono-thread, some rare filters multi-threaded), some other because of physical hard-drive being painfully slow, such as launching my applications on the morning (Mail+FireFox+Safari+NetBeans+…), browsing a huge photo library on Adobe Aperture (that is multi-threaded!), …

So we have 2 categories of slow-down: mono-threaded applications (or essentially mono-thread) and hard-drive bandwidth limited applications.

What could I do to make them faster?

For mono-threaded applications, you could just put a processor with higher frequency (or efficiency at same frequency), but to add core or thread won’t help, they don’t even use correctly a dual-core CPU, they usually are 32bits instead 64bits! Maybe the best is to choose a multi-threaded compatible application, or wait for the application to be optimized or rewritten?

For hard-drive bandwidth limited the solution is simple, put a faster hard-drive, but I have done that with an upgraded 7200rpm instead basic 5400rpm hard-drive. If rich, simply drop an SSD instead, it will do the job really faster. Just I couldn’t do that for my photo libraries, there’s no 512GB SSD available there! (And if it was, I couldn’t afford it)

Why I don’t bother 4-core or 4-thread mobile CPU?

It’s because there’s hard-drive bandwidth limited application where faster CPU won’t help in any way, and the other applications I am already awaiting dual-core support from them. A simple good support of my Core2 Duo mobile CPU will boost them with 60% to 90% faster speed, and it’s enough for me, at least now.

If application like FireFox or Photoshop CS4 were optimized to 64bits, it will offers me a 10% direct boost on performance, as stated by GeekBench. 10% is going from 2.8Ghz to 3.06Ghz equivalent for free!

If they were rewritten to support multi-threading on my simple dual-core dual-thread Core2 Duo, I would expect another boost ranging from 50% to 70% more. With the 64bit-support it will be a total 60% to 90% boost on performance, that will change my life as a Mac user!

I don’t care hyperthreading or 4-core new MacBook Pro, I just need correctly written 64bits multi-threaded applications to have my *ACTUAL* laptop flying high! And having 4-thread on Core i7 or even a 4-core Core i7 QM won’t help, these mono-threaded poorly written applications will just use 1-core, 1-thread, and leave more of what I paid for (Intel CPU) useless!

So, please Mozilla, please Adobe, rewrite your applications, go to 64bits Cocoa, multi-thread your code, make our actual laptop shine and reveal their real power!