Results: Adobe Creative Suite
It appears that Photoshop CS6 doesn’t effectively utilize Core i3’s logical cores, as our Core i5 control, with its quartet of slightly higher-clocked physical cores, cuts image processing times in half. This spells an easy victory for the stock Core 2 Quad Q9550, though the same doesn’t hold true in Premiere and After Effects.
Acrobat X, being single-threaded, yields results consistent with iTunes and Lame, though with a larger advantage for the Ivy Bridge-based platform.