John,
It may depend upon what the range of work is that you do for the decision to go with dual processors (SMP) to be worth the added expense. I’ve been running a dual Pentium II system since 1998 and I’m thinking my next system may well be just a single P4 which I’ll take advantage of Hyperthreading with. Why? As just a serious home PC and Photoshop hobbyist, the cost of an SMP system hasn’t really been justifiable in the long run. I thought at first that mine would be a "killer machine" to use with Photoshop, but that was based upon a false belief that SMP would benefit the application in all processes, which isn’t the case. Now, whether or not any changes in Photoshop CS put the SMP advantage to bettter use or not, I’m not sure. But, I’m thinking that for most users the hyperthreading technology of the P4 CPUs may be enough to outweigh any extra benefits of dual processors. On the other hand, if you get involved with 3D rendering applications any, those applications will more fully utilize SMP if I understand what I’ve read correctly.
One thing I will say however, is that my system has been very stable except where problems were introduced by driver errors. But, with up-to-date drivers compatible with WinXP, I rarely ever see a system crash. The only system I can contrast this with is my single CPU notebook which also runs XP…it too has never crashed. So single vs. dual, which is more stable? It’s hard for me to say since it may well depend upon the O/S and I’ve definitely seen WinXP to be the most stable O/S from Microsoft that I’ve ever run.
While the data I have is old, and is largely based upon PS6 results with Win98 and Win2K, you might find some data that I’ve collected to be of some interest. Various PS users have send me the results of their execution times for a test action that I created, as applied to a test image I provided. The collected results can be found at <
http://jazzdiver.com/photoshop/pc_test.htm> and cover submittals of data for both single and dual processor systems, Intel and AMD alike.
Regards,
Daryl
