Is possible to do this?

[lojasyst]

I want to transcode 10 live channels to 480p and 720p using the x265 codec.

I intend to buy one server with a dual socket of XEON E5 v3 with 18 cores to perform the task, total 36 cores 72 threads.

Is this kind of processing enough to perform the task? What would you buy instead of me?

Thanks

[MeteorRain]

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2699 v3, 18 Cores, 145 W, Dual Socket, Passmark Score 25798. That's what you chose.

I'd assume it'll cost you $10k+[1], with the same budget I'd go with something cheap, such as a 2U Twin server with E3-12xxv3 or E5-16xxv3 (if go rack) or just 5+ small boxes consumer grade PC (if go cheaper).

Let's say if you go cheaper way, you can get an i7-6700k box for less than $1k, and that's with a score of 11018. You get 5 boxes and that's already double the performance of your dual 2699v3, and costs less than half.

If you go rack, you probably can fit two E5-1650v3 motherboards on a 2U rack box, each with a score of 13526, and you still get less than $5k cost per server(s)[2].

[1]: HP DL380 Gen9 Intel Xeon E5-2699v3 (2.3GHz/18-core/45MB/145W) Processor Kit (781915-B21) $6,399.00* (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=7235212)
[2]: Intel Xeon E5-1650 v3 Haswell-EP 3.5GHz 6 x 256 KB L2 Cache 15MB L3 Cache LGA 2011-3 140W Server Processor $614.99 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117499)

[lojasyst]

Great information MeteorRain

Is opteron 6300 series not suitable for this task because lack of AVX2?

What about using a GPU for instance XEON PHI ?

[MeteorRain]

Great information MeteorRain

Is opteron 6300 series not suitable for this task because lack of AVX2?

What about using a GPU for instance XEON PHI ?

Not sure about AMD series since I'm not quite familiar.
Let's say AMD Opteron 6380 2.5GHz 16MB Cache 16-Core Processor $1,588 has a passmark score of 10082, a bit lower than the i7-4770k.

To sum it up, since you are doing multiple channels at the same time, using cheaper hardware is way more cost effective. High-end server chips are more suitable for indivisible tasks or huge memory consumption, such as a giant database (indivisible, sort of) or a virtual machine host (huge memory).

GPU, for now, doesn't really help.