Hi E, My opinions are based upon only twenty-four hours of real editing time, so I haven't had the chance to test all of Cinelerra's effects, but I'll give you a quick summary of my impressions.
I bought a Dell SC1430, 64-bit Intel dual quad core running at 1.6Ghz. Since Cinelerra is optimized for multiple CPUs (cores), I thought the more the better, right? Well..the reality is a little different. For specific video effects that are really CPU intensive, like the Oil Painting effect, all processors are utilized at 100%. This is great. However, I've noticed that for most editing and project rendering tasks (using a project with simple transitions/fades/keyframes/effects like histogram), Cinelerra only utilizes a small portion of each CPU, roughly 30% at peak. This bugged me, because I had hoped that all CPUs should be utilized 100% all the time during any task. But my opinion was based on a naive view of how Cinelerra utilizes system resources. One nice thing about having lots of cores is to use them for background rendering, a feature I never used on my single core box because it took up too much CPU. Background rendering allows you to see the effects you've applied to the timeline, rendered in realtime. The "realtime" part of this doesn't really happen for me; even with eight cores, there is lag time before I can playback the pre-rendered hdv video. I believe the bottleneck in this case is slow CPU speed of each core: 1.6Ghz in the case of my Dell. My thought so far is that if I had to do it again, I'd want a dual, dual core running at 3.2Ghz. That way, I get the benefits of multicores, plus the benefits of fast CPUs. Also, I'd probably go for an AMD Opteron multicore, because the AMD hyper-transport technology has much better throughput than the Intel Front Side Bus technology. This article in Linux Journal was very instructive: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:R95w9nhv680J:www.linux-mag.com/microsites.php%3Fsite%3Dbusiness-class-hpc%26sid%3Dmain%26p%3D4183+site:linux-mag.com+opteron+quad+core+intel+cloverton&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a "Unlike a single FSB, hyper-transport allows more total memory bandwidth throughout the system and there is less contention for memory." I suspect that Cinelerra would perform much better on an AMD system with less memory bandwidth constraints than the Intel Clovertons I use. In sum, I think the most important factors to you should be the CPU speed of each core and the memory throughput of the server architecture. To answer your question specifically, my observations lead me to believe that perhaps an FSB 1333 with duo core 3Ghz would better utilize each CPU than a slower CPU & FSB quad core. But look into the AMDs. I'm willing to bet that they'd give you much better performance. scott On Thu, 2007-12-27 at 21:01 +1300, E Chalaron wrote: > Hello > > Just wondering about a config for a new machine. > With the quad cores coming up I am wondering if I should invest in an > average quad core or a good duo, being tied to a budget. > Basically my question is > "would a FBS 1333 with a duo core 3Ghz be faster than a 2.4 Ghz quad > core 1066 FBS, all other thing being equal?" > Most of my needs are : > unsharp, histogram correction, saturation on progresive frames of 1400x1040. > Cheers and happy new year to all. > E. > > _______________________________________________ > Cinelerra mailing list > Cinelerra@skolelinux.no > https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/cinelerra _______________________________________________ Cinelerra mailing list Cinelerra@skolelinux.no https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/cinelerra
