Thinkpads Forum

I'm planning to get a ThinkPad mainly to use for doing page layout and design work, using Adobe's Creative Suite, mostly Photoshop and InDesign.

I was going to get a T60, but I don't know if I'm prepared to wait two months for those to ship (I just called IBM and that's how long they said it's going to be for all models of the T60 to ship).

How much difference will it make for performance on these programs on a T43 vs on a T60? What about if I'm multi-tasking, using these programs and others at the same time?

Thanks for any thoughts.

I suspect that there is little, if any, difference in the performance of Photoshop and InDesign on a T43 versus a T60.

Here are some links;

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/col ... /page2.asp

http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2001/cm ... oject.html
(128-bit SIMD isn't the issue at hand, but has enough talk about parallelism and an example in MMX to be relevant)

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/printthread.php?t=4193
( a little discussion about multiple processor systems

For one, I am not entirely sure Photoshop produces tangible results from a Dual Core setup; if it doesn't, you will end up being only able to go up to the maxiimum clock speed available. It would benefit from the higher memory capabilities that the T60 could offer, but unless you are doing some really huge jobs, a maximum of 2GB should be enough. I have tried Photoshop on multiple processor machines and haven't seen very tangible increases in performance per unit cost; even for batch jobs which would benefit from a dual core setup.

A memory boost provides more performance per unit cost in the case of Photoshop. Dual core would help a tad, but I would put more priority on the memory you could get on the Thinkpad.

If you are multi-tasking, then dual core has an edge over just a single core since it can handle more instructions pet unit time; the only bottleneck, however, would by the OS and how it handles requests from the programs for resources. I haven't looked into how well Windows XP does that, but I suspect it is a fairly reasonable job.

Thanks for the thoughts and links Christopher. Most of those articles conclude that multiprocessors do speed up Photoshop when doing image processing operations (often twice as fast). What do you base your conclusion on that multiprocessors won't make much of a difference?

A few things; Amdahl's Law, not finding too much info on Photoshop taking *full* advantage of mutiple processors, and some personal experience.

I do know that Photoshop CS2 supports it; but I have little to no knowledge of the older Photoshop versions and what they do with multiple processors (Photoshop 7, I think, supports it). Using Photoshop on a multiple processor system seemed to be very quick, but that workstation had a good deal of memory and Photoshop seemed to benefit off of this more than having multiple processors. If I had a limited amount of money to spend, I would first go for a good memory upgrade and then start looking for dual core. It all depends on how heavy the usage is.