11-14-2012, 09:44 PM
A single data point for you:
I moved from a 1.83 Core 2 Duo Mini to a 2.0 Quad Core i7 Mini and saw my Handbrake video encodes go 3.8 to 4x faster. Predictably, processor utilization went from about 195% to 795% (Hyperthreading faux cores included).
If FCP uses the processors similarly, you should see a similar improvement.
I moved from a 1.83 Core 2 Duo Mini to a 2.0 Quad Core i7 Mini and saw my Handbrake video encodes go 3.8 to 4x faster. Predictably, processor utilization went from about 195% to 795% (Hyperthreading faux cores included).
If FCP uses the processors similarly, you should see a similar improvement.