How do you compare the system resources used by two programs? How do you compare the system resources used by two programs (e.g., Chrome &amp; Chrome Canary)?

I think the new 64-bit Chrome Canary is causing my computer to heat up a bit more but I'd like to compare it's system resource usage to the regular version before adopting an opinion.
You can compare CPU utilisation and memory usage in Activity Monitor, in /Applications/Utilities. This lets you compare the statistics in real-time.

For a more averaged comparison, you can check the Average Energy Impact of an app in the Energy tab of the aforementioned app (requires ≥10.9).