MPEG4-AVC encoding and 8-core

[theinv]

Hi all,

I am thinking of upgrading my 3-year old Pentium 4 3.0Ghz to a multi-core processor.

Currently, my choices are

1) Intel quad-core QX6700

2) Intel Xeon 'Clovertown' X5355 Quad core X 2 (Two quads on one motherboard. This makes it 8-cores)


I am assuming that all encoding software will eventually have suppport for 8-cores, so I am buying for the future and I am leaning toward the 8-core .

My questions is whether the 8-core setup will deliver twice the performance of a quad-core processor.

Are there any MPEG4-AVC encoding software that can really take advantages of the multi-cores, especially quad-core or 8-cores?

Does the x264 distributed encoding farm works on a machine that has multi-cores (e.g. by treating each core as a separate machine)?

[_xxl]

You could try x264 - a free h264/avc encoder.
r607 | pengvado | 2006-12-16 00:03:36 +0100 (Sat, 16 Dec 2006) | 13 lines
New threading method:
Encode multiple frames in parallel instead of dividing each frame into slices.
Improves speed, and reduces the bitrate penalty of threading.
Side effects:
It is no longer possible to re-encode a frame, so threaded scenecut detection
must run in the pre-me pass, which is faster but less precise.
It is now useful to use more threads than you have cpus. --threads=auto has
been updated to use cpus*1.5.
Minor changes to ratecontrol.

http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
binary:
http://www.x264.nl/
changelog:
http://mirror01.x264.nl/x264/changelog.txt

[graysky]

Well, I have seen x264.exe provide a boost around 1.7x when using more than 1 thread in an MeGUI encode. Setting this varible from 1 to 2 resulted in a boost of about 1.6x and from 1 to 3 about 1.7x. You can see the data in this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122318).

Will this xfer to a quad or 2xquad cores with settings like 5 or 6 and 9 or 10? I don't know.

I would be interesting to get someone with a QC6700 to try the test encode in that thread I referenced using different thread # values.

[Doom9]

thread scaling (1-2-4 cores) has already been discussed in the hardware forum

[jeffy]

Probably:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=117756&page=5
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=119480

Other:
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=x5355&page=10
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q4/xeon-vs-opteron/index.x?pg=9

[bond]

moved