Trying to find a "Best Video Encoding CPU for the Money' article. Anybody got any leads? If there isn't one, there should be! I know I can compare the charts, but it's not the same.
Not the phenom it lacks SSE4 instructions unfortunately.
Op it will depend on the application your using and if you do video editing as a hobby. If you use Photoshop in your sparetime the 2600k would be the best all round performer.
If you do it professionally then the I7 9xx models with a 700usd Pci-e raid add in card.
Remember video editing a balance system is more important than a super fast cpu. Nvidia cards are also advised as its widely supported and hardware mpe give you big boost as to software mpe.
So the 2600k with the Gtx 560ti, 460, 470 or 480 gpus would be your best bet. The quadro 400 that came supposedly outperforms the Gtx 580 by 5 fold thanks to its driver support that's what was reported but we all know what nvidia can do so ill leave that one to the driver modders to bring out the truth
Photoshop = CS5 that's what I meant.
DISK I/O test:
The overriding factor is disk speed here. The test uses many small reads and a large sequential write (nearly 13 GB). Number of cores makes no real difference (it is not well multithreaded), but clock speed does.
MPEG2 DVD test:
The two overriding factors here are amount of memory and number of cores. More is better here. Additionally the location and speed of the pagefile can be important especially if you have a small amount of RAM.
H.264 test:
Here the speed of CPU/RAM communicationis king. Number of cores, clock speed and the amount of CPU cache are very important. Dual processor systems are hampered by the 2 chip communication.
CPU / GPU Test Result:
This is almost solely based on the video card and whether hardware or software MPE is used.
MPE Gain:
This shows how much faster hardware MPErendering is than software only rendering. The minimum score is of course 1, since if there is no hardware MPE available, there is no performance gain.
Then
Our Hardware Design Conclusions
*.Absolutely most important is the CPU, right now that is the Intel i7 processor or the dual processor Xeon 56xx series. Specifically for MPEG encoding the amount of memory is the most important facor to influence performance. As you can see from the performance data the speed ofthe processor is also very significant. AMD processors lack the full SSE set of instructions and are not as effective as the Intel processors.
*.A dual processor setup profits from the extra cores during MPEG encoding, but is hampered during H.264 encoding due to latencies between the 2 chips, a single i7 profits from more cache.
*.With CS5 4 or 6 GB of RAM is minimum, 8or 12 GB is suggested for most users. For heavy multitasking or dynamic linking, 16 or 24 GB is optimal
The Adobe minimum basic disk system isan absolute minimum of two 7200 rpm disk drives. Our personal preference is for a 10,000 rpm drive for the Operating System & Applications disk and a RAID array for the project files. Specific functionslike a separate dedicated drive for writing Output files or Preview files are of less value as it may just slow things down compared to a high performance RAID.
.A CUDA/MPE card makes a huge difference in performance and improves quality of the output over software MPE.
No way a dual opteron will outperform a Xeon nor the 980x in video editing. The overhead of the cpu communication smacks it into the ground. Here's proof
http://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html
Opteron getting smashed by everything of intel in all those encodings
http://ppbm5.com/Test.html
Now if you mean Internal communication between cores, Intel's is superior by virtue of a much more efficient usage of caching technology allowing for far superior communication between various cores through the caching mechanism. This is a remnant of the Core 2 days when an FSB was still being utilized and remains present in Nehalem and Sandy Bridge. This explains why Intel still retains superior Core to Core communication bandwidth and far lower latency than AMD (a. AMD has inferior caching technology and B. HT offers less bandwidth and higher latency than cache for core to core communication).
As an overall platform... it is a bit of a mixed bag with Xeons taking the overall lead in terms of computational performance but things getting quite close when it comes to point to point interconnect throughput and latency.