[mythtv-users] ffmpeg and multiple CPUs. Was: Should I be switching to 0.21?

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Apr 15 21:34:41 UTC 2008


On 04/15/2008 04:41 AM, John Drescher wrote:
>>  The fact that more recent Intel CPUs don't seem to support this feature
>>  makes me suspect it was something of a boondoggle all around.  Intel
>>  seems to have given up on it and just moved to putting two or four whole
>>  CPUs on one chip.
> Core 2 processors do not support this feature because they have a
> shorter pipeline and they make more efficient use of the cpu units
> (alu fpu)  such that there is generally not many free slots to
> schedule the extra thread on.

I.e. there are few companies that could tack a "workaround" onto a
poor-design*** and come up with a "must-have" feature, but Intel
succeeded.  :)

Hmmm.  Now that I think about it, that statement pretty much describes
x86-32 (from the original 16-bit x86, a.k.a. x86-16) and x86-64 to a
tee, so Intel did it at least twice (x86-32 and HTT) and AMD did it once
(x86-64).

Mike

***OK, I admit that the P4 design has its virtues and works pretty well
at certain classes of tasks--primarily those that were taxing to
computers at the time (high resolution video/multimedia)--but I'm glad
that "real computers" (i.e. those that do general-purpose computing
well) have progressed far enough (compared to the desired resolution of
video, etc.) that the NetBurst design has been killed.


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