Saturday, August 28, 2010

Apple Aperture Exporting on a Hexacore Mac Pro

I recently upgraded from a 2008 Apple iMac to a 6-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro. The iMac is an awesome computer with a beautiful screen, and I never complained about its speed (3.06GHz dual core) until I bought a Canon 5D Mark ii DSLR. The 21mpx RAW files and stunning HD video took its toll on my hard drive and processor.

In the week that I've had the Mac Pro, I've been nothing but pleased with how great this machine is. Along with that, however, is the painful realization that most software has yet to take advantage of all twelve of those logical cores. Aperture is *much* faster than it was on my old machine, but I'd expect to see more parallelization of bulk tasks such as importing.

Importing isn't ideal, but I just noticed that exporting is! Here's a screenshot from iStat of an 80-file export, successfully using my machine's full potential.



I won't hold my breath for better use of the cores in other areas of the app right now, but I will definitely enjoy knowing that exporting will be nearly as fast as it can be.

2 comments:

Gareth Angel Photography said...

how much memory are you using at present?

Blake said...

I'm not sure how much I was using then. Right now, after exporting a few photos, my Aperture is using 4.5GB of my system's 12GB.