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- does the decoding benefit from dual cores or would I be better off with a<br>
single core at a higher clock rate?<br>
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Decoding is task which is hard to multitask. So if you only decode you are better with higher clock rate or bigger cache. But...<br>
If you decode and playback in same time it is better to have dual core, becouse you will get lower latency, which is what you want.<div></div> </blockquote></div><div>Thanks - this pretty much answers my question. I figured decoding was largely single-threaded so throwing a second core at it @ the same clock probably wouldn't solve the problem. But, if I'm interpreting what you're telling me correctly, the second core can offload the playback portion of the job and help out in that way - it sounds like it's worth it.<br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>H264 benefits a great deal from multicore decoding. Parallelization is designed into the codec. I don't know much about the details but I believe the ability to do multicore decoding depends on the file being encoded with "slices". I would assume that most stuff will be encoded such that it can be decoded on multicore systems, since they are the standard these days. If you are talking about a combined FE/BE system then there are many benefits to have multiple cores. You can have mysql,commflag, or whatever running on one core, and have another core completely dedicated to your playback.<br>