My company uses Altium Designer for PCB design and the most CPU intensive operation seems to be the autorouting.
My question is, when considering a new computer, would it benefit autorouting algorithms more to have multiple cores of a given speed, or fewer cores of a higher speed? Does Altium's autorouting take advantage of multiple CPU cores?
Specifically I am considering laptop processors but this question could easily apply to desktop processors as well.
Best Answer
Altium is currently single-threaded, so a quad-core will not benefit you much.
I've heard Altium talk about multi-threading in the future, but at this point, I'd say go for a really fast dual-core over a slower quad-core.