i7 vs xeon for encoding

[turok]

lol wierd asking this but yeah.... i7 is one of the best processors out there. And although Xeon is like workstation thing and whatnot but it can do 8 cores. which would be the best for use of encoding (like reducing ETA during encoding.)?

[poisondeathray]

There is no difference between the equivalent class processor; ie. the desktop part and it's server analogue are identical except for QPI links for the server part is it is an EP model (dual socket). There are uniprocessor models for xeons too, and these are virtually identical to their destkop "brothers" except they support ECC memory

e.g. i7 920 is the same as the uniprocessor xeon w3520. Both are 2.66 @ stock speed , and both only support 1 socket. The xeon usually costs a bit more

The server class xeon EP has support for 2 sockets, but is otherwise functionally the same . These are about 2x the price for the corresponding desktop model, but exactly the same in performance. The equivalent EP model is the x5550 which is a 2.66 GHz part

Desktop enthusiast motherboards allow for overclocking, while server motherboards do not. You should always get better performance for increased clockspeed, but not always for increased parallelism (increased #cores), depending on what the bottleneck is.

So if your software only scales and makes use of maybe 2-3 cores, or there is another bottleneck like a filter, then it doesn't matter how many cpus or cores you have - it will be as slow as the bottleneck

[Blue_MiSfit]

Yep. The current Xeon generation == i7, plus QPI and ECC support.

The sweet spot for the Nehalem Xeons is the 5520, which supports hyperthreading and 2 sockets.

If you want to build a very fast encoding rig, can spend a bit of cash, and use x264 or other software that scales to 16 logical cores (which x264 can comfortably do), then a dual Xeon system is the only way to go ;) Dell makes some nice workstations, and the MacPro isn't half bad either. You can also roll your own, but server chassis are a tricky thing. I'd suggest a Dell server to be perfectly honest. You can get away with a system for a hair under $2k :devil:

~MiSfit

[turok]

thx for the info