Re: FCP X hardware performance

[Oliver Peters] "While in general I would agree, I do have to say that Apple has never taken good advantage of multiple cores "

Agreed.
I am wondering how an i7 and Xeon of the same vintage compares though.
If each have same cores and speed, Xeon should still be faster in some functions. I'd love for someone(s) to do such testing.

My concern about tests of different models from different years are that it may well be that, for example, a 2011 Quad i7 iMac is faster in some functions than a 2008 Quad or maybe even Octo Xeon MacPro.

If Apple updates both the iMac and replaces the MacPro this year, I'm sure we'll see such tests.

Tangentially, on another forum someone was comparing FCP7 and FCPX export on a MBP 13" and, without going into all the details, FCP7 was faster. My own speculation is that FCP7 doesn't really care about the GPU whereas the more resource hungry FCPX isn't given much with the integrated GPU of the MBP 13". A claim that FCP7 is faster would have to be qualified to the system. Heck I bet FCP7 is much better on a Core2Duo than FCPX. Given how little RAM is used FCP7 might even appear faster on system with only 4GB RAM. FCPX would starve on such a system.

Basically my point is, when doing speed tests there's several things that need to be considered. I would be carefully saying FCPX is "optimized" for i7 unless it's compared to a like Xeon, not older ones.

For example, would expect an 8 Core 3GHz Xeon 2006 MacPro to be faster than a 4 Core 2.8GHz i7 2011 iMac since 2006 MacPro has higher GHz and more cores?

I might guess that the 2011 iMac would be faster (at least with regards to many FCPX functions) because of the improvements in the new i7 processors compared to 5 year old Xeons. I don't know this for a fact but that's why I bring up vintage as an important consideration when testing.