[mythtv-users] AMD Athlon 64 CPUs and MythTV Compiling

[Brad Templeton]

Sorry, but as I pretty clearly said,the whole clock speed thing _does_
matter a bunch on this very specific application -- mpeg encode and decode.

Other people have extensively benchmarked mpeg encode, and Pentiums win
hands down.   My own tests, described below, show the same thing for decode
though I have not seen official benchmarks.

For just about everything else, AMD is a better choice -- often faster,
cheaper and lower-heat.

But not for this one.  For this one Intel wins, and the reasons are a
combination of the fact that on some applications a faster clock really
makes the difference, and some supposition that the long pipeline does
matter on this particular app, though I have not seen that documented
fully.

But the CPU idle times are quite clear, I have two identical systems,
one with Athlon-3000, one with P4-3ghz (512k cache), and the CPU used
by the P4 is much less.


On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 03:28:25PM -0600, Aaron wrote:
> I would go with the Athlon 64, the whole clock speed thing doesn't really
> matter as much anymore. In many cases a 2GHz Athlon 64 will outperform a
> 3GHz Intel. The Athlon 64 has a built in memory controller, lots of cache,
> and most if not more SSE and MMX type extensions. You would also have the 
> ability to switch things to 64bit as they become available. All of the
> core Operating system and most applications are already ported and I 
> would expect them to get much faster once people start optimizing for
> Athlon 64. And it does cost less.
> 
> > However, no question, the P4-3ghz is way faster than the Athlon-3000 (not
> > Ath64) at mpeg decoding.    30% idle or less on Ath-3000.  60% idle on
> > P4-3ghz.
> > 
> > This is because the P4-3ghz is at 3ghz, while the Athlon-3000 is at 2.2ghz.
> > 
> > The ath64-3000 is at 2ghz -- it might even be slower than the regular
> > athlon.