Is a dual core enough for lightroom/PS?

[Ksanti]

I'm looking at replacing my laptop to get something I can process images on and I'm coming down to either a Dell XPS 15, XPS 15z or Vaio F series. The XPS 15z looks pretty nice (the XPS 15 and Vaio F are very bulky which isn't a dealbreaker but it is a negative), especially with the RGB display, but I'm concerned about the performance in lightroom and photoshop?

My benchmark is my i7 920 @ 3.4gHz/6Gb RAM/7k2rpm hdd and I'd like my laptop to hopefully match the performance or be able to run with it. I do some pretty hectic editing sometimes rather than just running stuff through lightroom which is what worries me.

Anybody use a dual core here and can give a description of performance? For reference the 15z I'd get would have an i7 2640M in it.

 

[Ksanti]

It will be fine. It's not automatically going to crash because it's not a quad core. You may just find yourself waiting a little longer than you would on a desktop i7.

Yeah but in terms of futureproofing I don't want anything substantially slower than my desktop i7 - the i2670QM chip that's in the XPS 15 and Vaio F is meant to outperform my 920 so being slower is a potential problem depending on how much slower it is.