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I've got both core and btcd running on one box and they seem to take about the same resources
btcd  CPU(raw): 64.6%   CPU(machine-share): 1.3%   Cores used: 0.65
bitcoind  CPU(raw): 56.9%   CPU(machine-share): 1.2%   Cores used: 0.57
Only the btcd one is public facing though, its serving block filters to neutrino clients with a high connection cap and is pretty well known, usually pumping out 20+mbps... given that, it's pretty efficient
There were some performance fixes last year iirc but I think they were mostly related to initial sync/verification