OT : More CPUs or Faster CPUs
Chris Snook
csnook at redhat.com
Tue Feb 5 19:06:54 UTC 2008
Paul Lemmons wrote:
> I am soon to purchase a new PC. It will run Fedora and its primary
> purpose will be:
>
> 1) Transcoding my DVD library to xvid-avi's so that they may be watched
> on my media player
> 2) Editing training videos that I create and burning the finished
> product to DVD for distribution
>
> To transcode I will most likely be using dvd::rip and for editing I will
> probably be using cinerella
>
> Now that that is said and money not a limitless resource I have some
> choices to make. One of those choices is CPU configuration. For the
> tasks above, which is better:
>
> 1) A single very fast CPU
These don't exist anymore. All the high-end commodity chips are at least dual-core.
> 2) Dual core CPU with combined speed greater than or equal to a single
> CPU but each core slower than a single CPU
Actually, dual-core goes higher in both clock speed and cache-per-core these days.
> 3) Multi socket CPU with combined speed greater than a single CPU but
> each CPU slower than a single CPU
This only makes sense if you have a multi-threaded application, and a lot of
money. You may also end up needing a RAID array to have enough I/O throughput
to benefit from this.
> Bang for buck, option 2 sounds the best to me but I am concerned that
> the process of transcodeing is single threaded and would not take
> advantage of multiple CPUs.
>
> Thoughts? Suggestions?
If your app is multithreaded, but you don't want to break the bank, consider a
single quad-core CPU. You won't get the memory bandwidth boost from going
multi-socket, but transcoding should be mostly cache and CPU-bound anyway.
Transcoding should scale very well to multiple CPUs, if you have a multithreaded
implementation.
-- Chris
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