What's the difference between a computer processor and the memory?

Question

Hi!

I was just wondering, what's the difference between a computer processor, and the memory?

I have a now-older MacBook Pro. It has a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and 2GB memory.

I use Aperture (Apple software) to edit photos and it's really slow. I noticed on the crucial memory website, I can upgrade it to 8GB for a reasonable amount.

Would upgrading the memory make the photos edit faster, or is it down to the processor?

...like when I apply or change settings, it takes ages for it to actually change on the photo.

Cheers!

Answer 1

A processor (also known as a CPU) is the boss chip inside your computer. It interprets all the programs, does most of the calculations, and decides what data goes where.



The memory is a bank of chips that hold data and software that the processor is currently using. It has no processing/working capabilities of its own - all it does is hold data.



Both components affect the speed of your computer, because if you don't have enough memory then your processor is forced to access data directly off the hard drive while its working, which is extremely slow.



Upgrading your memory allows more programs/data to be stored on the chips (which are lightning fast), which will better enable your processor to do its job.



You should be aware however that your processor is just slightly out of date, so it may struggle anyway with intensive software tasks such as photo editing.



So in short: Upgrading your memory is a great, cheap way to make your computer faster, but still don't expect it to be able to make instant photo changes or anything.



Also, even though crucial is an awesome resource for looking up memory specifications, their prices are actually fairly high. I recommend you take the specs for the recommended memory they gave you and instead use them to shop at a different site such as newegg.com.

Answer 2

The processor is a physically separate chip that contains the circuitry to perform mathematical and logical operations. This is where new values for color, contrast, etc are calculated.



The results of those processes are retrieved from and stored to memory. There are actually several levels of memory each with different size and speed and this is where you often have the biggest performance impact.



Closest to the processor and highest speed but smallest in size is the cache memory. This is used for high speed access for intermediate operations. Next larger and slower is main memory. That is the 2GB you are talking about. Then the last stage is your hard drive which is the largest and slowest memory stage.



In many cases when editing large photos the image data is too large to fit in the main memory so the processor has to go all the way to the hard drive to fetch the image data. This will greatly slow the processing speed as the processor does a lot of waiting for data to arrive. You can often improve performance by increasing main memory as you are considering.



There are some cases, however, there won't be much performance increase from adding more main memory because the architecture of the main board has a low performance data bus connecting the processor to the main memory. Another issue is that the I/O performance to the hard drive can be a big performance killer. If the editing software uses the hard drive for multiple copies of the image (so you can restore for example), you may end up waiting on hard drive operations even with larger memory. It is probably still worth it to try more main memory and see if there is a performance improvement.

Answer 3

The amount of memory (or RAM) your computer has determines how much data it can load at any one time. The more memory your PC has, the better it will perform when you are running resource intensive software, or lots of programs at the same time.



Your processor, on the other hand, actually crunches the numbers and makes things happen. The faster the processor is, the faster you will see things happening on the screen.



Upgrading your RAM may well make your photo processing software run faster for two reasons:



1) Because you may be running other software at the same time which will max out your RAM

2) Because 2GB isn't a lot in today's world



I would advise that you should upgrade to at least 4GB of RAM.



One final, but very important, point I would like to make is that your PC will only be able to utilise up to 4GB of ram if you are running a 32-bit operating system. Windows XP, Vista and 7 all come in 32 and 64 bit versions. In order to utilise more than 4GB of RAM you will need to be running a 64-bit version of one of these operating systems.

Answer 4

Your CPU is important for photo editing, however a sufficient amount of memory is critical for photo editing.



Also make sure the cpu isn't working on tons of other stuff in the background.