Is an i7 chip wasted on Sketchup?

[Arnold55tree]

I'm told there is no point upgrading from an Intel i5 to an i7 since not many programs are designed to make any use of the extra cores in the chip. I imagine it would help Sketchup if it has a rendering plugin but for everyday house design? Can anyone confirm?

[Dave R]

SketchUp only needs a single core so adding more won't do anything directly.

[Arnold55tree]

Thanks Dave

[slbaumgartner]

As Dave says, SU uses only a single core, so there is no benefit to quad vs duo unless you have enough other things running at the same time to fill all your cores. However, SU will benefit from a faster clock rate or from a faster CPU architecture, so potentially an i7 might be faster than an i5 depending on details - but we're talking about incremental, not for example a factor of 2 or more.