oivindi

Ok, I *know* I will probably notice the difference somehow, but how will it be obvious in terms of music making? Will I notice it in Ableton Live (more plug-ins?)? Will I notice it if I run several applications at once? How will it affect Max 6? etc.

The reason I ask, is that I want to upgrade from my two year old MacBook Pro.

I am considering the 13" MBP with 2.9GHz (dual core), or the 15" 2.3GHz MBP (quad core). I really like the smaller form factor and weight of the 13", but, of course, I have seen the Geekbench benchmarks for the 15" (about 11.000, vs. the 8.000 of the 13" MBP).

There is also a price difference - 13" is quite a bit cheaper. I already have a very nice Crucial M4 SSD, which will be transferred from my old Mac to the new Mac, so that will take care of disk speeds.

quad-core-vs-dual-core-how-will-i-notice-the-difference

I believe you can exploit the extra cores if you use poly~ in patches, so if you are doing audio which requires a lot of processing power and your processes can be poly-fied, then there may be some benefit. I don't know about any other multi-threading capabilities in max, which is what you need to use the other cores...

Another trick is to split off parts of your Max system in standalones. They're then separate apps to the OS and will be spread over the CPU cores. More MHz and cores also means more apps that can be run along side Max.

Quad core vs. dual core - how will I notice the difference?