How many cores can lightroom effectively use?

Specing out the new machine and I see that the 2.4ghz core 2 quad is about the same price as the 3ghz core 2 duo. The core 2 duo would be nice if I buy call of duty 4. But if lightroom would be happier with more cores I'll go with the core 2 quad.

Great Question! I just did a quick check on my home desktop (Dual CPU - Dual Core Xeon - Vista) and most LR tasks seemed fairly evenly spread among each core. There are some exceptions - Slide Show and Web Creation seemed to be dumped primarilly to a single core, with exception of disk IO (?) (this machine is dual controller SCSI Raid, so i'm not really sure what o/head should be in this type of app). I'll load some trace tools (from sysinternals) and report more results . . . .

-John

Very cool. I'm leaning towards going with sheer speed of core rather than more of them.

I'm jumping from an AMD 3800+. I'm pretty sure the 50% clock increase combined with the faster core 2 architecture should about double the processing power. So I should be happy with this no matter what.