Fellow Encoders, I bring you the death of AMD

[cogman]

And the birth of Uber Fast encoding, Nehalem (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3326)

If you are too busy to read, here is the jist of it. Clock for clock it is 20-50% faster then Penryn. And guess what apps get the 50% boost, thats right, x264 is on that list.

It will support Hyperthreading, with 4 cores. That is 8 logical cores. Basically, everything good that AMD did, Nehalem has and it is Better, IMC, L3 Cache, ect. This thing will be a beast.

So go ahead and drool and through you respect to the late AMD.

[Dark Shikari]

On the other hand, given that the most recent round of our assembly benchmarks show the Phenom to blow the Penryn out of the water on SSE2 instruction processing, I think they have a bit of fight left in them yet ;)

[cogman]

On the other hand, given that the most recent round of our assembly benchmarks show the Phenom to blow the Penryn out of the water on SSE2 instruction processing, I think they have a bit of fight left in them yet ;)

:) We can only hope, but I don't think AMD will reclaim the upper-market anytime soon. One of the most impressive parts of Nehalem is its memory access. It is blazing fast, while supporting triple channel DDR3.

How well did x264 work with hyperthreading, Was there a decent boost? The numbers from Anand seem to suggest that yes, there is.

[deekey777]

And Nvidia will crush every CPU with their CUDA based encoders.
In the future we will need a CPU, which supports SSE/2 and an Uber-graphics-card...

[Doobie]

I sure don't miss the days when I'd let Divx 3 encode something over night, and half the next day. But, I'm happy with what we have now, and I'm in awe with what I expect from future graphics card-based encoders.

I'd also sure like to see AMD put a fire under Intel, as they did back when they released the Athlon.