Food fight!!!!! (was Re: [mythtv-users] Power to the Masses ...)

[Jeff Simpson]

> Well, for certain tasks, Megahertz really do matter.  Encoding
> with lame, for example.

Not to continue a flame war, but frequency is really no longer an
accurate measure of speed. Both Intel and AMD adopted a numbering
system for their chips that is NOT the clock speed, for the purpose of
giving the consumer an idea of how fast the chip operates (for
example, my AMD 1600 is not 1600 Mhz, it's 1.43Ghz). I don't know what
the new measure is for the Intel chips, only that it's not straight
Ghz. A better way to measure it would be operations / second, but even
that depends on optimizations, what compiler is used, what the
operation is, etc. If the pentium happens to have more efficient mpeg
decoding, it will work better than the AMD, regardless of the
frequency the chip runs at. I prefer AMD chips because you get a lot
more bang for your buck, but I'm not surprised that pentium
outperforms on this task at the higher end of the market.

But again, this is just based on what I've heard from people who've
tried it, I haven't looked at any benchmarks on the subject (although
I would like to see some mpeg decoding benchmarks if there are any out
there).

 - Jeff