On Friday 18 February 2005 08:52, John R Pierce wrote: > > another significant use of high power processors is video encoding. I do > this more than occasionallly albeit not full time, and my 2,5Ghz P4 isn't > fast enough for me... encoding a DVD from a hour of editted camcorder > footage can take 3-4 hours on my system > Yeah, well, until all the processing that anyone could possibly want to do can be done in a picosecond or two, there will always be people crying for more power. I'd like to LL test 2^(2^24036583-1)-1 ... and even if I could do that in a fraction of a second then I guess I'd be able to find even bigger Mersenne primes. (Before anyone points out that fitting the work vectors into the physical universe would be a more than trivial problem, I'm well aware)
If encoding a DVD takes hours, then surely the sensible thing to do is to run it in background (batch) mode. At which point it's more or less irrelevant if it takes 3-4 hours or 8 - just leave it running overnight ... the point being that a 25 GHz P4 is still going to take longer than you'd be prepared to sit waiting for. Besides which, by the time 25 GHz processors are common, you'll be taking 10x as long to encode video as you'll be demanding several times the resolution. Most people, most of the time, do nothing more demanding than rendering web pages, encoding and decoding music & still photos. 1 GHz processors are quite sufficient to do that. My guess is that, given realistic marketing of the benefits of lower power systems in terms of lower noise output and reduced utility bills, the CPU speed numbers game would practically die out overnight. Except amongst hardcore games freaks, and a small minority of users with particular requirements e.g. processing digital images made by high-resolution scanning from medium-format film, which can easily be 100x the size of the images typically captured by consumer digicams. As well as Mersenne testers ;) Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
