Dual-core: what's the score?

[Stonechatz]

Does dual-core processing make a marked difference say, when crunching 26Gb DV down into [edit:700kb] 700Mb XviD? This normally takes me 10 hours in total on a 2.8GHz P4, 512kb, WinXP SP2 system. Or does the extra functionality afforded by the dual cores let me watch TV AND crunch to MPEG4 simultaneously (amongst other things)? I guess it could be too soon in the evolution of dual-core for any real testing to have gone ahead ...

[redwudz]

They are good for multitasking and if the programs you have can use dual core natively, you will see some improvements over a single core CPU of the same speed. That said, not that many programs can make use of DC at present. One article link: http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,121266,pg,1,00.asp

[waheed]

when crunching 26Gb DV down into 700kb XviD?

700kb

You mean 700MB

I guess DC may contribute to some improvement, but as redwudz says, until software supports DC, dont expect a massive improvement.

[jagabo]

The Divx codec is very well multithreaded. Dual core will compress close to twice as fast as single core. Xvid isn't as well multithreaded but is definitely faster with two cores. Most current MPEG2 encoders are multithreaded and run much faster with two cores. TMPGEnc Plus is usually about twice as fast. Cinema Craft Encoder is much faster. I have an old version of Ulead Video Studio. It isn't multithreaded and doesn't benefit from dual cores.

If you are doing a lot of filtering in addition to encoding you won't get as much of a speedup unless the filters are multithreaded too.

[Zen of Encoding]

crunching 26Gb DV down into 700kb XviD

WOW !!! Now that's some *real* compression.

Can you still make out that there are human figures in the image?

[Jester700]

They are good for multitasking and if the programs you have can use dual core natively, you will see some improvements over a single core CPU of the same speed. That said, not that many programs can make use of DC at present. One article link: http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,121266,pg,1,00.asp

But that article was written a year ago. Dual core prices have dropped and apps that use it have... well, I dunno, but there certainly are no fewer.

It still bears some decision making, depending on the apps you use, but it's a more viable decision now than ever before, and will only become more so.

[chesterfield]

does nero 6 use both cores, i should say nero vision express when converting MPEG to DVD...MY MOBO supports Dual Core but i have my 3.2 HT chip in it. I use vision express to burn captured TV programs as I have a Cable Digital Box connected to my PC. I use Beyond TV and capture using "Best Quality". A one hour program comes to 3.16 gig in MPEG. Nero Vision Express 3 converts it, then burns it at 16X---total time from start to finish is just under ten minutes---could it get any faster?????

[jagabo]

I should clarify something: When I was running benchmarks with Xvid and Divx, comparing single vs dual core on my Athlon 64 X2 3800, I was compressing both both audio (PCM to Lame) and video (DV to Xvid/Divx) with VirtualDubMod. The reported doubling in speed may have more to do with VirtualDubMod than the codecs themselves.

[jagabo]

A one hour program comes to 3.16 gig in MPEG. Nero Vision Express 3 converts it, then burns it at 16X---total time from start to finish is just under ten minutes---could it get any faster?????

Not much. The 16x burn and hard drive speed (remuxing MPEG to VOB) is the limiting factor in your case.

[deadrats]

Does dual-core processing make a marked difference say, when crunching 26Gb DV down into 700kb XviD? This normally takes me 10 hours in total on a 2.8GHz P4, 512kb, WinXP SP2 system. Or does the extra functionality afforded by the dual cores let me watch TV AND crunch to MPEG4 simultaneously (amongst other things)? I guess it could be too soon in the evolution of dual-core for any real testing to have gone ahead ...

first things first, i don't think you mean that you can compress 26Gb down to 700kb, perhaps you meant 700mb.

regardless, your question isn't an easy one. if you have a 2.8ghz P4 with HT and swap in a dual core 2.8ghz, chances are you will see a slight improvement in overall encoding time when converting to xvid (<--- a poorly threaded codec), mostly due to OS overhead being offloaded to the second cpu. what you will notice is a much smoother computing experience when you are doing a long encode session.

if you encode to something like wmv or real media (both are very well threaded codecs) you will notice a near doubling of encode speed.

in general, depending on how well the codec and app are threaded, you will notice anywhere from a 50% to 100% speed increase.

but for xvid encoding it would be a waste of money to buy a dual core cpu...

[chesterfield]

A one hour program comes to 3.16 gig in MPEG. Nero Vision Express 3 converts it, then burns it at 16X---total time from start to finish is just under ten minutes---could it get any faster?????

Not much. The 16x burn and hard drive speed (remuxing MPEG to VOB) is the limiting factor in your case.

so---should i stay with the current processor, or waste my money and upgrade to the 3.2 dual core at just under $400.00???? i need an LGA 775 processor anyway because i have a MOBO sitting w/two 160 sata drives configured in RAID 0 waiting to be put together for another computer. i won't loose my raid array if i keep thise drives with that MOBO and a lot of good stuff is loaded on them....

[redwudz]

That's true that the article I linked to was a little old. But it gives the basics. You will see an increase in speed, but it depends on your pocketbook. The fastest dual cores will give the biggest gain, with the right programs that use them. There is still not a whole lot of programs that are dual core aware and make the best use of the setup. That will improve as the dual processor format becomes more common.

More programs will come on line in the future. If you use certain programs, go to their websites and see if they plan to support DP and when. I would use DP just for the multitasking improvement, if the price were right.

AMD and Intel both are promoting DP as they have come near the end of the maximum speeds they can squeeze out of the present CPUs. For those companies, DP is more of a marketing ploy to increase sales. That's their bottom line. With the increased use of high definition, more processing throughput may be needed. If it's not available in processor speed, it will be with DP.

Bottom line, if you can afford it, go for it. JMO.

[edDV]

If you are buying for future needs, just wait for software to catch up. By then quad core or 8/16/32/64 core will be available for the same price.

It all comes down to what you need to do now + 12 mo.

[chesterfield]

again, i have a MOBO with two hard drives in RAID 0 that can easily be put back together. do i buy a 2.8 dual core SMITHFIELD @ $196--see link--and leave the current system with a 3.2 Prescott w/HT

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819116213

or, do i buy a 3.2 dual core PRESSLER @ $379 for the current system--see
link--

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819116239

BTW--the 3.2 has gone down $40.00 in the past few weeks, i may just wait a little longer....

[edDV]

again, i have a MOBO woth two hard drives in RAID 0 that can easily be put back together. do i buy a 2.8 dual core SMITHFIELD @ $196--see link--

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819116213

or, do i buy a 3.2 dual core PRESSLER @ $379--see
link--

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819116239

BTW--the 3.2 has gone down $40.00 in the past few weeks, i may just wait a little longer....

Depends on what you need for current software. That $379 will drop below $200 in months.

Why do you need RAID 0? What are you doing that justifies loosing 320GB to a spark?. Either drive has enough bandwidth without RAID 0 unless you are doing uncompressed capture. In that case, invest the money in a hardware MPeg2 encoder and save yourself time and effort.

[chesterfield]

i need another LGA 775 processor to put together another system....i replaced my MOBO and hard drives with 3/gig per second hard drives...250 gig WD @ 3/gig a second from NEWEGG.COM for $90.00 each. i am waiting for the 3.2 pressler to come down more in price...see pic below of current setup with new MOBO and new hard drives, plus it has 2 gig of DDR2 667 memory @ only $140 from newegg. i have a MOBO with memory and two sata drives in RAID 0 sitting around doingf nothing until i get another processor....



untitled.jpg

[jagabo]

How about some real numbers?

TMPGEnc Plus converting a 60 second NTSC DV AVI to 720x480 8000 kbps CBR using the default settings you get when you start with the wizard:

P4 2.8 GHz HT: 75 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 1 core: 87 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 2 core: 43 seconds

VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.1 converting a 60 second NTSC DV AVI to 720x480 XVid/Lame AVI with the settings you get pressing Xvid's "load defaults" button (except I have to manually enable 2 threads in the Xvid codec):

P4 2.8 GHz HT: 171 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 1 core: 184 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 2 core: 92 seconds

Same VirtualDubMod test without audio:

P4 2.8 GHz HT: 118 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 1 core: 96 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 2 core: 69 seconds

I used Windows XP's NUMPROC= argument in the BOOT.INI file to switch between 1 and 2 cores.

[edit]

It struck me as odd that VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.1 is so much slower when encoding both audio and video than when encoding video alone. I see that 1.5.10.2 is avaialable and a quick test indicates that it doesn't have the same problem. I'll re-run the tests with the newer version.

Here are the numbers (same test as above) for VirtualDub 1.5.10.2.

With Lame audio:

P4 2.8 GHz HT: 115 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 1 core: 103 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 2 core: 72 seconds

without audio:

P4 2.8 GHz HT: 113 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 1 core: 99 seconds
A64 X2 3800+ 2 core: 71 seconds

[Stonechatz]

Ahem - red-faced 700Mb is (of course) what I should have written! Having said that, 700kb would be nice ... )

[Stonechatz]

If DivX responds better as it is better threaded, then I might be persuaded to change from XviD over to DivX - that would then justify the dual-core setup - or as someone mentioned, wait 12 months and use a quad-core. The ideal is realtime MPEG4 compressing as the signal is written live from the TV-card to the disc - with full (HD) time-shifting and viewing options without that making any stress or strain on the CPU ...

[edDV]

...
The ideal is realtime MPEG4 compressing as the signal is written live from the TV-card to the disc - with full (HD) time-shifting and viewing options without that making any stress or strain on the CPU ...

This will be very difficult to do with a software encoder using near term CPU options. That need will be met with a new generation of tuner/VIVO cards with full hardware decoding and encoding (focused on SD/HD h.264 and VC1 plus maybe divx, xvid).

Save your money because the first generations won't be cheap.

[jagabo]

If DivX responds better as it is better threaded, then I might be persuaded to change from XviD over to DivX - that would then justify the dual-core setup

The difference isn't big enough to matter. When I originally ran some tests with Divx (Xvid wasn't multithreaded at the time) I used VirtualDubMod 1.5.10.1 which had a problem when encoding both audio and video. When the program ran twice as fast with two cores I attributed it to Divx -- because I "knew" that audio encoding was a minor component of the benchmark. Later when I ran multithreaded Xvid benchmarks I was looking only at video compression and saw a much smaller improvement when using two cores -- and concluded that Xvid wasn't as well multithreaded as Divx. The two codecs are actually pretty close in terms of performance improvement when moving from one core to two. There's no reason to prefer one over the other on that basis.

or as someone mentioned, wait 12 months and use a quad-core.

That strategy may or may not work. If programs aren't showing much improvement going from one core to two, they will show even less improvement going from two cores to four. On the other hand, with another year to optimize their code, maybe the multithreading will improve.

Some other things to keep in mind:

AMD is about to introduce a new socket, AM2. If you buy a Socket 939 motherboard now you won't be able to upgrade the CPU to the latest version a year or two from now. The switch to AM2 doesn't appear like it's going to improve performance by much but it leaves the door open for future upgrades.

Intel is close to introducing it's new Core Duo desktop line (new CPU, socket, chipset, motherboards). They are claiming a big reduction in energy consumption and a big increase in performance (over Pentium D). Early indications seem to verify those claims. The formal word from Intel is that these will ship in the third quarter. I've heard credible claims of July.

[vitualis]

Encoding video is something that does in fact scale well with additional cores. The codecs just need to be written to take advantage of the additional cores well.

Regards.

[edDV]

If you want a preview of where multicore is heading, check this out. Good to see Windows XP is ready for 8 core or more.
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=39966

A bit pricy at the moment ($80,000 for 4 Opteron 885 processors + 128GB of RAM and 7 terabytes HDD).

[kush]

Umm, no it's not..XP Home can only address 1 processor core, XP Pro 2 cores (either 2 single core CPUs, a single dual core, or a single P4 w/ HT). Pro x64 can also only support 2, but by M$'s wording, it may be possible for x64 to recognize 2 dual core CPU's..

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/howtobuy/choosing2.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/facts/top10.mspx - "Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is designed to support up to two single or multicore x64 processors for maximum performance and scalability."

..I suppose it's possible for M$ to add support/recognition of multi dual cores, or simply change the EULA to reflect such a change, but that's not likely, snice Vista is on the horizon, albeit ~9 months away. And it's somewhat pointless and futile to go x64 ATM, since not alot of hardware manufacturers are writing proper x64 drivers (or software ports over to x64) - most are simply waiting for Vista.

[edit] Back to the topic at hand though..With my Opteron 165 (dual core), I can't really say how much difference in speed there is over a single core...I simply haven't run any tests with either dvd/mpeg2 encoding, or xvid..But what I can tell you is that I can set my PC off on an encode, and still have buttery smooth operation of my PC while it's going on..For example I can set affinity for Vdub to goto work on core0, and run everything else on core1....

Or (slightly OT from the video topic, but still applicable IMO) play WoW, with the usual background progs running (close to or sometimes even over my 1 gig of physical memory), and alt-tab out for a http search for quests/info/whatever without so much a hint of lag between the two. That's something that would never have been possible on my old machine (AXP Tbred B @ ~2.15GHz).

[edDV]

Umm, no it's not..XP Home can only address 1 processor core, XP Pro 2 cores (either 2 single core CPUs, a single dual core, or a single P4 w/ HT). Pro x64 can also only support 2, but by M$'s wording, it may be possible for x64 to recognize 2 dual core CPU's..

That is all mere licensing detail. They could productize whatever they want.

Actually, the Boxx apexx8 is using Windows Server 2003, (64-bit); Red Hat Linux or SUSE Linux, your choice.

http://www.boxxtech.com./products/apexx8.asp

[momentarydogma]

I know I'm a little late in asking this since the last post in this thread was over a week ago, but can anyone help me with a question I can't seenm to find the answer to? At my job, I do a lot of DVD burning and a bit of editing (Premiere Pro 2.0). I recently built a new system for this purpose, and I opted to use the Athlon X2 3800+ CPU. On my old machine (3.2GHz Pentium 4 single core), it was always risky to run CPU-intensive programs while I was burning a DVD or encoding video. If I was burning a DVD in NERO, I could simultaneously re-encode a DVD with DVD Shrink, but the performance of both apps was greatly reduced, and this would often lead to failed burns. I was hoping to be able to do both at once on the dual-core machine. Is this still risky? And how does the system assign core usage? Should I set the affinity to one core for NERO and set it to the other core for DVD Shrink, or simply allow both programs to use both cores? What's the best way to run two apps at once with no slowdown?

[jagabo]

I know I'm a little late in asking this since the last post in this thread was over a week ago, but can anyone help me with a question I can't seenm to find the answer to? At my job, I do a lot of DVD burning and a bit of editing (Premiere Pro 2.0). I recently built a new system for this purpose, and I opted to use the Athlon X2 3800+ CPU. On my old machine (3.2GHz Pentium 4 single core), it was always risky to run CPU-intensive programs while I was burning a DVD or encoding video. If I was burning a DVD in NERO, I could simultaneously re-encode a DVD with DVD Shrink, but the performance of both apps was greatly reduced, and this would often lead to failed burns. I was hoping to be able to do both at once on the dual-core machine. Is this still risky? And how does the system assign core usage? Should I set the affinity to one core for NERO and set it to the other core for DVD Shrink, or simply allow both programs to use both cores? What's the best way to run two apps at once with no slowdown?

Your problem may be the two programs competing for disk access not CPU time. Especially if the files you're burning to DVD are on the same drive as the files being shrunk.

If CPU time is the problem just run DVD Shrink at a low priority. I often have VirtualDub running at idle priority in the background while burning DVDs. Never have a problem. Even on a single core, non-HT 2.8 GHz P4.