Re: OT : More CPUs or Faster CPUs

Ian Malone wrote:

On 05/02/2008, Paul Lemmons <paul.lemmons@xxxxxxxxx> 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
2) Dual core CPU with combined speed greater than or equal to a single
CPU but each core slower than a single CPU
3) Multi socket CPU with combined speed greater than a single CPU but
each CPU slower than a single CPU

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?

I don't know about the video editing, but transcode (the backend
DVDRip uses) can use multiple cores to do the video encoding.
On top of that there's always audio encoding as well.  That means
two cores gives you a ~2x speedup (not quite 2x, as audio isn't
parallelised). Comparing the prices of dual core CPUs with ones
twice the speed it quickly becomes apparent which the better
option for that application is.

In addition the faster processor makes more demands on the
rest of your hardware: you may need faster memory and a more
expensive motherboard for it.

I do some of the same thing as this and went with dual core AMD.

--
Robin Laing