Kougar
09-11-2006, 01:30 AM
Now, for those that are asking what having 4 real cores is actually good for, I can finally answer: Encoding!!
If you do ANY kind of HD or H.264 encoding you will see very tangible results with using a Quad-core CPU. DivX encoding also shows a healthy advantage as well. MPE2 to WMV9 for HDTV quality using Premiere Pro 2.0 also showed a large performance gain. The same resulsts again with WMP 9 Encoder.
For instance, a 24 second clip will take a FX62 4:09 minutes to encode from MPEG2 to H.264. HDTV, 1920by1080 resolution. A Core 2 Extreme takes 3:27. Now a Core 2 Quadro at the same speed takes 2:01. Now realize this was only a 24 second clip! Try to imagine what a full hour long movie would be (Or calculate it out). :-P
I can quote some impressive numbers all day long that put the FX62 to shame, and even cast somewhat of a shadow over the "only" dual-core Conroe breathren, but y'all can just read the benchmarks for yourselves if you are interested enough to still be reading my post: THG: "Four Cores on a Rampage" (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/10/four_cores_on_the_rampage/page1.html)
In summation, almost any media encoding, WinRAR, Photoshop CS2 and most especially 3D Studio Max 8 showed gains from using four cores. Multitasking benches showed the expected gains, and in 3dmark06 Kentsfield was overclocked to 3.33ghz (On stock voltage) and received a CPU score of 5016.
According to Tom's Hardware Intel is fixing to release the processor known as Kentsfield sometime after October 1st. As expected there are program incompatibilities, however they've confirmed this is nothing new. The previous Intel Pentium 965XE that offered two physical cores each with hyperthreading (for a total of four logical cores) also resulted in the same issues. Namely Call of Duty will not run, and there are issues with WMP 9, both resulting from core allocation.
The future belongs to HD content. If we take our benchmarks into consideration you can no longer get by without a quad-core processor. Test results with the software packages Main Concept with H.264 encoding and the WMV-HD conversion make this very clear. We noticed performance jumps of up to 80% when compared to the Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed (2.66 GHz). A Core 2 Quadro at 2.66 GHz and higher is the answer for HD video (editing and rendering) at full HD resolution (1920x1080).
With a maximum system power draw of 260 W, the power consumption of the Core 2 Quadro system levels out in the same league as a Pentium EE 965. In idle mode, the system required 167 W - this is the same amount of power that a Core 2 Extreme demands at full load. The reason for this likely lies with incomplete implementation of Intel's SpeedStep technology at this stage.
Oh, and one final thing I should make note of. THERE IS NO FSB BOTTLENECKING evident in the full barage of benchmarks, zilch. :twisted:
If you do ANY kind of HD or H.264 encoding you will see very tangible results with using a Quad-core CPU. DivX encoding also shows a healthy advantage as well. MPE2 to WMV9 for HDTV quality using Premiere Pro 2.0 also showed a large performance gain. The same resulsts again with WMP 9 Encoder.
For instance, a 24 second clip will take a FX62 4:09 minutes to encode from MPEG2 to H.264. HDTV, 1920by1080 resolution. A Core 2 Extreme takes 3:27. Now a Core 2 Quadro at the same speed takes 2:01. Now realize this was only a 24 second clip! Try to imagine what a full hour long movie would be (Or calculate it out). :-P
I can quote some impressive numbers all day long that put the FX62 to shame, and even cast somewhat of a shadow over the "only" dual-core Conroe breathren, but y'all can just read the benchmarks for yourselves if you are interested enough to still be reading my post: THG: "Four Cores on a Rampage" (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/10/four_cores_on_the_rampage/page1.html)
In summation, almost any media encoding, WinRAR, Photoshop CS2 and most especially 3D Studio Max 8 showed gains from using four cores. Multitasking benches showed the expected gains, and in 3dmark06 Kentsfield was overclocked to 3.33ghz (On stock voltage) and received a CPU score of 5016.
According to Tom's Hardware Intel is fixing to release the processor known as Kentsfield sometime after October 1st. As expected there are program incompatibilities, however they've confirmed this is nothing new. The previous Intel Pentium 965XE that offered two physical cores each with hyperthreading (for a total of four logical cores) also resulted in the same issues. Namely Call of Duty will not run, and there are issues with WMP 9, both resulting from core allocation.
The future belongs to HD content. If we take our benchmarks into consideration you can no longer get by without a quad-core processor. Test results with the software packages Main Concept with H.264 encoding and the WMV-HD conversion make this very clear. We noticed performance jumps of up to 80% when compared to the Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed (2.66 GHz). A Core 2 Quadro at 2.66 GHz and higher is the answer for HD video (editing and rendering) at full HD resolution (1920x1080).
With a maximum system power draw of 260 W, the power consumption of the Core 2 Quadro system levels out in the same league as a Pentium EE 965. In idle mode, the system required 167 W - this is the same amount of power that a Core 2 Extreme demands at full load. The reason for this likely lies with incomplete implementation of Intel's SpeedStep technology at this stage.
Oh, and one final thing I should make note of. THERE IS NO FSB BOTTLENECKING evident in the full barage of benchmarks, zilch. :twisted: