Are Nehalem Processors useful for a Video Editor?

[jt_x]

I was just wondering wheater a Nehalem Processor is useful for a Video editor or not, are there apps that profit from the sse4.2 instructions or the added 4 logical cores ? compared to a penryn with same clocks.

[WC Annihilus]

Nehalem is an encoding beast, end of story

[chui101]

Just look at some of the benchmarks for nehalem systems... anandtech, toms hardware, hot hardware, etc... to sum it up, nehalem blows penryn out of the water. 30% jump in encoding speeds for matched clocks? yes please!!!!

now about those X58 motherboard prices....

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/in ... i=3326&p=6

[milkmandan]

As everyone has posted, yes i7 is a great processor to use for encoding, though the increase in price is probably not worth the extra speed. (at least right now for high end i7s)
It really depends on the encoding software you are using. If the encoder DOES NOT support multi core (1 core only), it is absolutely USELESS. A Core 2 Duo with higher clock speeds would perform better.

Lets see for example; we have an i7 with 8 logical encoding a video. The encoder can only support 2 cores. When matched up with a similar processor with the same speed but only 4 cores, the i7 will only perform better due to the L2/L3 cache. Not because the i7 has 8 logical processors.

Until we see programs and encoders take advantage of all 8 logical processes, the i7 will only be a little bit better, and not PHENOMENALLY better. We 'should' be seeing close to 2x encoding speeds if this were the case. Only a lousy 30% increase.

are there apps that profit from the sse4.2 instructions or the added 4 logical cores ?

Adobe programs, no. flat out no. They use 2 cores max and only some programs (i think), i'll be generous and say (maybe, most likely not) 4 cores. I don't know about Vegas or others.
a Quad core with with WAY better clock speeds might even perform better and cheaper.

[milkmandan]

however more cores will allow you to multi-task with more freedom, so that is something to consider

[milkmandan]

forgot to add, Adobe After Effects will take advantage of multiple cores, for better RAM previews and what not.
and final export.

I am not sure if Adobe Premiere takes advantage of multiple cores when rendering.

[jt_x]

forgot to add, Adobe After Effects will take advantage of multiple cores, for better RAM previews and what not.
and final export.

I am not sure if Adobe Premiere takes advantage of multiple cores when rendering.

I heard that these programs are very limited when it comes down to rendering things with more than one thread i think i heard that from version 8 or somthing and Pro 3 from the other program, did they change this in version 9 and 4 ?.

I also thought that x264 would get speed ups. now im somehow more exicited about CUda and using a gpu for rendering, but i read a lot bad things about that, sadly i might add.

[milkmandan]

well i know for a fact that After Effects CS4 (version 9) will take advantage of more than one thread when rendering things. If you go into AAE CS4 Preferences and find the Multicore Processing tab you can actually set how many cores you want AE to use for previews and what not. I am not sure if this was present in AE version 8, but my guess is yes.

For Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, you can read this article: http://web.archive.org/web/199902181614 ... .pre5.html
Pro has been multi-threaded since version 5.1. Only takes advantage of 2 threads so far, not sure if it does more. :\

[jt_x]

well i know for a fact that After Effects CS4 (version 9) will take advantage of more than one thread when rendering things. If you go into AAE CS4 Preferences and find the Multicore Processing tab you can actually set how many cores you want AE to use for previews and what not. I am not sure if this was present in AE version 8, but my guess is yes.

well what i meant by limited is that it was possible to do Multithreading with v8 BUT one core (thread) needed about 2GB of ram which sums up to 8GB(!) on a quad core, and thats what IS poor about its multithreading, i just thought they had fixed that on v9, but im not even sure if it is possible to program it do it different than that ie use less ram somehow.

[milkmandan]

@harimakenji:
ah, i know what you are talking about.

Yes in v9 they did fix that
You can set the amount of RAM AAE CS4 uses and the number of cores. They divide the available RAM up for the number of processors.
So if you have a total of 8 GB of total ram in your system and you set CS4 to use 5GB of RAM only and 3 cores for processing, then each core would use 1666.66GB of ram to use.

With a quad core machine you would have 1 more available core to do other things and 3 more GB of Ram. :\