[mythtv-users] Dual or Single core Athlon64 for MythTV front-end machine

George Mari george_mythusers at mari1938.org
Sat Jan 31 22:20:27 UTC 2009


Dale Pontius wrote:
> I'm putting together a dedicated MythTV front-end machine, and at the
> moment am picking the CPU, going through the 45W choices at Newegg.
> 
> Prime Candidates would be the X2 2350, and the single-core 1640.  The
> former is of course dual-cored, clocked at 1.9GHz, with twin 512k L2.
> The latter is clocked at 2.6GHz with 1M L2.
> 
> My current inclination is to go with the latter.  While it has less
> overall crunching power, it's single-thread execution is likely better,
> and I don't know how much a MythTV front-end can really use two cores.
> I understand that this is a no-brainer for a back-end, that more cores
> is better, but it seems an open question to me for a front-end.

[deleted]

I have a single-core Athlon 64, Socket 754, 2.2Ghz rig as a 
frontend-only, with an AGP Nvidia 6200.  It handles any kind of MPEG2 
you can throw at it, including 1080i.

It can play back ATSC 1080i at 1.3x playback speed with 5% idle CPU.

As I understand it, myth does not directly take advantage of multiple 
cores - yet.  I believe this is an evolving feature.

Even with out it, you have X itself usually taking up a fair amount of 
CPU during decoding and playback, so 2 or more cores aren't wasted.  It 
gives you a bit of headroom.


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