Recently took quite a number of photos of my little princess. Haven’t yet processed all,  not to say upload. I was wondering whether new CPUs dramatically reduce the processing time for DPP. Search on internet didn’t  fetch me such benchmark. The close I can get is Photoshop test,  which I’m lazy to launch. So I decided to run such a test myself. This benchmark would give you a basic idea of how Core2 Quad, Duo  and I7 perform in DPP.
The benchmark was run on two desktops,
my home one with Intel Core2 Quad Q9400, 2.66GHz 8G Ram, Win 7 64 bit.
The second machine is based on Intel  I7-2600, 3.4GHz, among the fastest quad cores, also 8G ram,  win 7 64 bit.
DPP latest version, I run a test of conversion 20 raw to jpg, 10megapix each.

Here are the results.
Core2 Quad  Q9400 54 seconds
Core I7-2600 35 seconds.

54/35 = 1.54. Considering 3.4GHz/2.66GHz = 1.28, besides the clock advantage, I7 core has 20% advantage from the new architecture.

Update: Second run, add one more CPU, Intel Core2 Duo P8600 2.4 GHz, 4G ram, Win vista 32bit,

14 raw to jpg, 10 megapix each. DPP processing settings: Neutral, Click white balance, Noise Reduction Lumi 2, Chroma 10, Sharpness 3 and some adjustment on the curve

Core2 Duo P8600 87 seconds

Core2 Quad Q9400 53 seconds

Core I7-2600  32 seconds

My three years old quad core machine is still quite OK. DPP prefers more cores than higher clock. My next upgrade would be adding a new graphic card for GPGPU. Hope DPP would support it soon.

Update: The test sessions were all run with single instance of DPP. If you manually split your photos into group and launch more than one DPP to process then the Quad core would be even faster than the Duo core CPUs.