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
