[mythtv-users] Zotac IONITX Performance

[Brian Wood]

On Tuesday 22 September 2009 12:02:21 MarcT wrote:
> It took me a little while to find this, it was an email I sent to MarcT
> off-list.
>
> I bought the  ZOTAC IONITX-A-U Atom N330 dual-core. It's got 4Gig of RAM
> and no hard-drive (I'm net-booting).
>
> Here's the excerpt that includes some details.
>
>
> At present, I'm still using the QT painter with .21, so YMMV.
>
> I expect the 230 would be plenty of power.  Honestly, I'd have probably
> gotten one of those instead, but they were out of stock (and Newegg was
> predicting over a week before they might get back in stock).  I had a short
> window to get it set up, so had to go with the more expensive model.
>
> As far as numbers go, cat /proc/cpuinfo shows 4 'processors' (0-3).  When
> playing Two and a Half Men HD, top shows:
>
> top - 01:12:19 up  5:04,  1 user,  load average: 1.32, 1.08, 0.63
> Tasks:  84 total,   1 running,  83 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 31.7%us,  0.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 65.6%id,  0.1%wa,  0.4%hi,  1.4%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem:   3347068k total,   626036k used,  2721032k free,        0k buffers
> Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,   279740k cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  5240 mythtv    20   0  765m 375m 127m S  121 11.5  87:47.70 mythfrontend
>  5227 root      20   0  447m 116m 106m S   12  3.6   7:10.36 X
>  5536 root      20   0 18952 1344 1008 R    0  0.0   0:00.39 top
>     1 root      20   0  3812  612  520 S    0  0.0   0:00.72 init
>     2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
> <snip>
>
> So, about 30% total usage over 4 'processors'. which should translate to
> about 60% of a single processor 230. (This is software decoding, mind you.)
>
> Once you throw VDPAU into the mix, I have no doubt a 230 will work fine.
>
>
> Hope that gives a little more detail,
>
> --PhillW
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I would like to add to this, I am using a -c-u, works great with the
> exception of a minute pause sometimes when playing back HD using VDPAU. I
> spoke to one of the Devs about this and was instructed to try a few things
> but the machine is off and unable to be used at the moment as I am in the
> process of moving. It might just be a configuration issue, but some others
> have reported the same thing with ION's in general. So this is not an
> IONITX specific issue.

Do you mean a "minute" pause as in a "small" pause? Or do you mean a pause of 
60 seconds?

The former might be tolerable, the latter would definitely be a showstopper.

Or, to put it another way, how long is the pause you are talking about?

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org