Mobile video editing machine..finding the bottle neck

[alphaae]

I currently have a mid 2009 macbook pro that I use primarily for video editing and graphic design.
It's been a good machine thus far buts it's starting to show its age. Rendering video are take extremely long . I know the ideal would be to build a mean desktop machine but the I need to be mobile so a laptop is the way to go for my particular needs. I would also like to stay with a apple machine as many of the people I work with use macs on their ends for the finish product. I know you can do the same on a windows but it just makes things easier working on the same platform. Now the main part of my questions.

My specs currently are as follows

2.8ghz core 2 due
8gb ram
500gb 5400rpm drive
CS4 Adobe

Looking at buying

2.6 or 2.8 core i7
16gb ram
500-1TB SSD
CS4 adobe

I know that the mac version of CS 4 was locked to 32bit system due to changes apple made on their end at the time.

If I'm going to use a different machine and use the same software will I see a huge improvement on my renders? Or is the bottle neck the software?

Thanks for your help in advance.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

The latest Macbook Pro has Intel Iris Pro Graphics, which are far superior to the graphics processing unit your current Macbook Pro has. You would probably see 2X better performance. If you insist on mobility and Mac, that's your best option.

 

[alphaae]

Does anyone know if CS4 has a software limitation with accessing multi cores for processing?